CW: bodies are gross, so is death

All cops are real. All cars are real. Do not use the phone. Do nothing to your hair.

These are just a handful of guidelines I learned from drug nerds in my 20s. That, and sometimes it’s just the drugs.

Having some handy mantras to remember when you’re out of your mind on alphabetamines also can help when your brain is going through a traumatic restructuring. Turns out our bodies have enough in our internal soup without outside influence to make you trip pretty fucking hard. Throw in the piss and shit, the gasps etched in your memory of the wasting love of your life?

This is why the sound in my head is a scream.

In recent months, I’ve understood that truly what separates me and the yelling person in distress down by the 7 Eleven is layers upon layers of masking and rule following and capacity to not full-throated scream in horror.

Tonight I’m coming down off a bad trip. Except there’s no substances involved, just grief. It slammed into me almost a half hour after I had noticed a familiar body high, a lusciousness to my skin that I remember so clearly from my first acid trip, where my clothes seem to drip from my skin while the lights kaleidoscoped against the wall.

About a month ago, as I was preparing for my trip to New York, I went through a heavy period of feeling like a time traveler where I was existing in a multiverse simultaneously now and then, myself and my younger self.

A lot has happened since then. A few days ago I still felt as if I was floating in some weird plane as I listened to friends tell their stories, honoring me with their radical honesty of their experiences. THIS IS WHY I EXIST - I cannot resist a good story, they find me or I find them.

Who needs drugs to trip like this?

I took a short bath in the clawfoot tub upstairs. The heat helped bring me down a bit. Last month as I was trapped in past times I’ve been running hard from anything that may bring me back there. Here, now, who am I? Breaking free. Becoming, integrating, reforming, reclaiming.

Exhaustion starts to come over me. I had some creative plans for tonight, but taking a cue from a friend I spoke to a few weeks ago, when this kind of shit hits you put on the brakes and just climb into bed until it blows over. In this case, I took a bath.

It’s not over. And one might say a newsletter ill advised under such circumstances.

But hey, I don’t have to remember all the rules.