Clean up the mess in your dirty mind, she said to me, so in the morning I dusted off the shelves of my neural pathways with coffee and nicotine. In the afternoon I still felt like a shadow, somehow—not a shadow of myself, elongated limbs and all, but the shadow of a low-hanging fog in a northern country—maybe England—but they call them bogs over there don’t they? Yes, my mind felt like a bog.
I asked my doctor for an amphetamine prescription, but he said he couldn’t because he’s under investigation. I did what came naturally: popped a vitamin-C tablet, made a day-pack of nicotine and beer, and hopped on the RER-B to the Parc de Sceaux to the south of the city, where I thought I might be able to clean up this mind of mine.
When the rains came, I sat beneath an oak tree to stay dry. The patter in the puddles was rhythmic, like a song I used to listen to as a kid with the door locked. When the rain did stop, I walked back through the mud and cracked open a tall-boy and drank it in four sips (they were gulps, really) washing down the fog and achieving some sense of inner chemical clarity as I made my way back to the city.
At the party at Henryk’s that night, the pills and the ketamine flowed until I felt like I had become my fingers. “I am my fingers,” I kept repeating like a mantra, my entire being flicking sporadically to the beat, my sense-of-self being rendered, slowly but surely, loading up with each pulse of the kick drum—1%, 5%, 20% complete.
My limbs were glass plates stacked one on top of the other until my face was liberated from itself, a hologram buzzing and floating to the rhythm, my whole body immobile on the dance floor but my mind pulsating. By that point, my entire being—my fingertips and my eyelids and my lips and my brain—felt like I’d been injected with novocaine, everything about existence vibrating just a few millimeters outside of myself. I was my fingers then, I swear it, each minuscule shift like the movement of a conductor’s baton directing an internal symphony.
The thing about dissociatives is they help you see yourself for what you are. My inner being was dancing even though I looked like a drug addled zombie, and all the while there were calm ocean waves crashing over the windblown shores of my mind. And then, down in the heavy soles of my feet, it all started again—25%, 38%, 50% loading complete.
Ketamine is an anxiolytic, so whatever come-down you thought you might have from the MDMA disappears in an instant. Like when the sun comes out and burns off a fog hiding a northern country’s landscape that’s usually cold and grey. It drops you onto the frothy crest of a wave that keeps rising without getting bigger, just maintains itself like a tidal bore rushing down a murky river, washing over absolutely everything, your worries included. And then there’s clear water and clarity.
And it's in that liminal space, dissociated from your own existence, where you take the deepest breaths and remember what it actually feels like to breathe, in through your nose and out through your mouth, like they tell you in yoga class or to calm kids down, exhaling through the tips of your fingers over and over again, standing like a tree with its roots in the dance floor, everything vibrating and fluttering and shimmering.
All of that lasts until the next day, anyway. It’s inevitable you’ll feel like a dried-up sponge for a time; not sad—really—just void and depleted and left to hang onto the memories. But that’s how life goes, isn’t it? We try to live in the present so we can look fondly upon the past. But when you haven’t felt much of anything you want to feel anything at all.
Clean up the mess in your dirty mind, she said to me. I tried. That was last Tuesday.
A Tall, Parisian Tale (Part 1)