halfacanuck

Today I returned to a place I've not visited in nearly a decade. As I laid on my back in the park watching the sky perform magic tricks a thousand thoughts flashcrashdashed in my mind, but could not escape from my mouth because they were too big to fit through the gap between my lips. Instead they bounced around and became mixed and inside-out, absorbed themselves and spiralled away, and I travelled through the recursive clouds accompanied by golden sparks which may or may not have been alive.

It's astonishingly difficult to describe a psychedelic experience, probably impossible. Many have tried. Only those who've done it -- done mescaline, acid or, in this case, mushrooms -- have any hope of understanding. It's like an exclusive club: you know, man, you just know.

Today I knew, and it was good. It was just as I remembered: the creeping weirdness of the coming up: the intensification of colours, the urge to grin, the incredulity at the beauty of it all, the sudden beauty of everything, even death and suffering, the warmth in my muscles, the laziness, the barrage of thoughts, the significance of a blade of grass. Then the peak, the intense hallucinations in the sky which sometimes got a little too crazy, but I just had to blink and they were gone, to be replaced by others, playful at first but then I let them run out like a movie until they were too crazy again, swirls and fractals in the clouds. Blink. The two levels of consciousness at once, the normal me in the normal world side-by-side with, or layered on top of, or weaved throughout, the other me in the other world, dual universes of experience. And closing my eyes for the colours and hippy patterns the lava lamp in my brain the dancing turning pulsing shapes and the piano playing in my head a song too beautiful ever to make real and the gloriousness of life and being alive in the sun on my face floating on the ground because. Then the coming down: the not really noticing, the gentling of the hallucinations, the ability to talk again and the desire, the lessening of the laziness, wanting to walk again, the lingering beauty of music and words and art and ideas and darkness, the slowly fading meta-reality, the convergence of both universes into one, one understandable whole, comprehensible for an hour or two, when nothing matters but everything is significant.

So now that I'm gone, how do I feel?

Ashamed, a little. Disappointing. A failure. But I also feel stronger. I think I'm beginning to rediscover myself, the self of whom I was once proud. The me who made the right decision even if it was difficult, the person asked to do the hard, painful shit because I could. Of course, the decision to leave may not have been the right one. I'll only know that in hindsight.

A failure? Yeah. I failed my wife and my step-kids, it is true. I'm ashamed of that, deeply ashamed. But I don't think I failed myself. What is the point in life, anyway? I've lost most of my faith. It dripped away somewhere over the last few years. For me at the moment, the point of being alive is to be happy, to be where I wanna be, doing what I wanna do. Selfish? Sure. This is perhaps the first time in my life I've chosen me over others, at least when it comes to a decision with such destructive force. I'm ashamed about that, too, but also kinda proud. I'm ashamed of being proud. I am, as you can tell, somewhat confused.

But yes, I don't think I failed myself. I did what I thought, and still think, was necessary to be happy. I wrestled for a long time with the notion that I should subsume my happiness in favour of that of my family. A real man would stay, I thought to myself. But I don't think I want to be a real man. I don't want a cowboy hat and a Camel. I just want to be happy. It's one of the hardest decisions, don't you think? My happiness, or that of four other people? The two are, at the moment, mutually exclusive.

Of course, the usual platitudes ran through my head. If I'm not happy they'll sense that, I thought, and it'll affect them too. But that's bullshit. I can be happy even if I know someone else isn't. My happiness isn't tied directly to anyone else's, it's not proportional but more or less independent. No, they'd carry on living their lives whether I was happy or not. To say otherwise is just an excuse, and a feeble one at that.

The decision, in the end, is whether I consider my happiness more important than that of others. I guess I must answer that affirmatively, given the choice I made. I'm not particularly proud of that, but I also don't think it makes me an evil person. I understand those I've hurt might hate me right now. Maybe they'll hate me for a long time, maybe they'll never truly forgive me. I suppose I feel it's worth the risk.