the pandemic is the perfect time to live in delusion and memory but I have chosen presence as a display of servitude to my goddesses who have gifted me with vision. and the truth was i’d been dodging life in an effort to sit down and type and this felt like the best first way to do this. to actually cave and give in and to start by allowing yourself to be taken by something that you have little control over once you ingest. to surrender to commitment. to commit to time. to commit to something. loyalty. loyalty is madness, love in a form, a manifestation, is loyalty. love is loyalty. true love is madness. I wasn’t thinking of my  parents so much as being subsumed by them. every time a thought of my father passed I wanted to get up. how to sit. you cannot outrun this.

before this started, I had pulled tarot downstairs and the cards themselves presented as meditative in their presentation.  I was remembering the four of swords though I had pulled the eight. the queen of cups. wheel of fortune. ace of swords. to become the witch, become the sword. I was really trying to focus on one thing. wondering what media would help. remembering the time I tripped with all my guy friends at nineteen in their dirty apartment as some of them did coke on the table. as I grappled with cheating on my boyfriend with one of them. as I began to trip, I saw nothing but scary faces and ran to the shower. then back in my friends bed. until one of them came in to grab me and said it’s just a trip, it will end. he put on a surfing video for me to watch and it was the most soothing movement I had seen. the way the were gliding across the water set to music, sunny, and far away. unreal. surreal to me, their grace. i used to swim. I think about that as my eye falls on my favorite painting, I think should I be watching something. the painting says“Instruction” on one side and then the artist has taken wide strokes of her brush and painted a stream of red all down a letter, a letter to a friend/love, so you cannot see what the original sender said.  then on the other side painted in black letters, “alter your behavior quickly.” an enlarged phrase the artist picked out, magnified, this piece of advice. later I read the whole phrase again. then I let it swarm me. watching nothing. flittering. almost devastated by being forced in this bed, my parents a short distance I can’t touch having grown so accustomed to being with them once a month. “once more I advise you, if you have any regard for your quiet, to alter your behavior quickly.; for I assure you I have too much spine that to sit contented with this treatment.” this pawing at myself and obsessively, clandestine with my needs then suddenly running.

a moving, a dizziness, a solemn regard for grief  and heaviness. stuff is not a replacement for love.  i suddenly had too much stuff. i wanted everything gone. sublimation is moving quickly from feeling the comfort of a baby blanket years ago enter the room then waft into tears you are dying to choke out but instead just transpire into thoughts. respire. perspire. they vanish or they become the tendril wrapping you. nothing has ever comforted me. I would not describe myself as a “comforted” person.  i wanted the plain white room. I had a recurring vision of dying at 34 and I’m convinced more and more I don’t have to. I’m convinced it was suicide. I wanted to move slower, slower than time and just watch things drift away. i felt certain on fleeing, the heaviness of leaving my stuff behind, knowing I might have to. these would be flashes of a minute. I reminded myself how much time I had left. about six more hours of this. it had only been the first hour, the coming up.  what have I been thinking? but the deep voice that is both mine and not mine came in: it’s not what you’ve been thinking, but what you’ve felt instead.

the pressure of the headache. so tense and the movement of my hands across the head. I had taken my hat off but at some point put it back on. it feels soothing to have weight on me. on my head, on my body: a blanket or pillow. I like wearing hats. I like hiding my hair. I stretched my forehead again. it was so much pressure. I unclenched my jaw again. I began to run my fingers all over my face again and my whole body tingled and it was incredibly serene right there. I had to keep my eyes kind of open fluttering, closing them was too confusing. the mushroom wants you to see the visuals they present not to dream but to experience. every time I closed them, the drugs willed them back open. 

I was staring at the painting again and thinking, people who go outside to take their drugs to escape are really missing something. it’s the nest you want to take them in, the cocoon, the place you spend the most time to see what it reflects back to you. in this kind of bubble too where you feel trapped, stifled, any dust is intensified. the first trip in this house I had in the middle of cleaning.

“surrounded by chaos inside and outside.”

I had gone outside that day too but felt electrified and began running down a block and then turned around and went home. these fits are normal for me. these spurts of energy. this was a breaking of chain. ground it, bring it down your spine and sit. rest. become a maelstrom of your own, not the tornado. watch your conjecture. get to the facts. I always tell people not to look in the mirror when they take these drugs because they will be unable to look away right away. they will inevitably see their faces deform and if they are unhappy with their face already, it is not the best place to start to pick yourself apart. especially as it becomes amorphous and takes on the superpower to morph into what you say it is. however, I looked at my face in the mirror twice already; once intensely for minutes and upstairs, here, briefly, as I reorganized the jaspers. this was grounding today. 

“this is an unusual trip. there are no hallucinations.”

I noticed the brightness of my eyes; both the color, a real honey amber in sun, but also the light that came from within.  I was squarely inside of myself and squarely insidreof my rowhome seeing the flaws: the cheap paint scratched, the floorboards coated with cat hair always, the general illusion and my greedy landlord. I saw it better and inspired by it, could affix myself to my eyes. not changing. not structured. not a form to step into but my real eyes. my real container is not the rowhome. I still felt like dust was hurting me. this was a day before cleaning. I had planned both trips this way so I can become comfortable with any dirt reminding myself that I had done this on purpose. that I was confronting a deeper part of myself today: the iterations, the obsession, the thought patterns that looped and forced both the organization, the sweeping and the burning of the house. the burning of the whole house down. you cannot outrun this. this is ground. this where you live.