Thursday, July 19, 2012

Ch. 7


Part VII: “LSD and Mushroom Reality Soup”
 (Spring 2010)
Love between two. Love between three. Love is a hard topic. Can I love? I feel like I have the hardest time loving Him who loves me the most. Yet I give my life, fully, to people who don’t love me in the last. If you’ve read this far, you probably have formed some sort of opinion. But this was the stage of my life that formed the person currently writing. Whoever that may be, whoever he will be. I’m sitting here, with a room full of people, who have thus far warned me that I’ve had too much to drink and worry for me. That’s a nice feeling. People who care enough to tell you when they think they’ve observed you crossing some sort of perceived limit. The hookah pipe passes, the drinks re fill and we, seem to be un able to find a fill. How can I reminisce, how can I reenter that state of mind that forever altered my life. So the thing is, I wronged some. I wronged a few. I fell madly into my version of love with a man and  a woman.

Mary, Elyse and Kendrick and I. I know that they hate me now, because I wronged them. But honestly I’ve never given so much of myself, so much love to people before in my life. Elyse was a girl I met at TCs lounge, everything about her seemed to say, I need to see what love is. And I was only the tail end of a shrooms binge. I thought I was finding enlightenment, and teaching my mind to achieve peace in the midst of trauma. We fell in love. She said that she hadn’t begun to heal until she met me. I told her I feel like I could be friends with the anti-christ, that I could show him love.

Sparks fly from the hookah as the people around me cheer. I’m too drunk to be relevant. Though the fact is, I’ve had three drinks over the course of five hours. I think we need people to pin our worries about ourselves to. Though I do admit my form was rare tonight. Speaking so freely.

Enter Kendrick. The ying to my yang. He was my Gilgamesh, I was his Enkidu. He said he would be with me wherever I lead people. I said I’d love him forever. I knew I’d die for him. He wanted to walk to Del Rio from Austin, I told him he mustn’t, but if he does, I’ll go with him. I had no idea till then what it meant to love a man or feel loved by a man. But I knew I’d die for him.

But things became strange very fast. Perhaps it was the acid. Mary, Elyse, Kendrick and I did acid together, and fell in love with each other. I loved everything about them. Their every flaw, their every gift. I gave my existence to whatever I thought they might need. I wanted Elyse, Elyse wanted Kendrick, and Kendrick wanted me. But we all three loves each other completely. But it was Kendrick and Elyse that found each other physically. The epitome of everything. I had never felt such heart ache. The woman I would marry, and the man I would die for, yet neither of them could find me. I wept for them daily.
                                                        
But the drugs were too much for me. I couldn’t recover. I was broken. I had to leave. I had to get right. I had to find the Lord Jesus, my boyfriend, my groom, my husband, my savior. IT seemed they couldn’t understand. I hurt them so deeply by leaving. I had to run. I had to love Jesus like I loved Elyse and Kendrick. And maybe then I would learn to love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love. Love.

My new friends keep patting me on the back. “Are you doing okay?” How can someone be okay re living something like Kendrick and Elyse… and Mary. Dear Mary. Mary I love the purest. Mary knew the least of my love. Mary felt left out. Mary didn’t know the torture I lived in, every second I lived with them. Post-traumatic stress disorder, overdosing on sleeping pills… Somehow Kendrick knew when it happened. He called me a countless times that night. How did he know? Are we destined to be together? Whatever our destiny was, we were, as he said, “binary stars”.


I fall when she sings,
“That felt good”
she said
as I spilt the
wine.


I wrote a book for her
on her son’s toy
xylophone
But I haven’t the strength
to read it

Surely the moon
must howl
for you

Angelic adult
urer p
urer
than
purity

such a
bandana
she wears
over her red
hair

surely her plain
face homes a thousand
views of perfection
Fingertips swirl time
on thinnest glass
and fracture
 wine

she sews the sea
with pitch and
melody

black berry lips
blue stained
filter

endlessly
as the sun gently
 creeps
upon the sea

she sings so
perfect peace
Soars over me

bitterness
bitterness
warm my bones

One night I slept beneath
a Celtic cross
that hung crookedly
over the sun set
and ocean

his voice touched my cheek
I asked to hold him
be still is all he told me
and his song became wind
and we were together holy (wholly) ?

my hair’s aflame
the sky with it
rocking the sea
with his perfect name
has our love grown
apocalyptic?


*** The Dark night of the soul*****
 (summer 2010)
Having my love for Elyse broken at the same time as my love for Kendrick break broke me. I loved them both so much and was happy for them both. But … I snapped. Maybe the hallucinogens left me unstable for a season. It was probably a combination of heart break and mental break that finally broke my spirit. And this was the best thing that ever happened to me. I lived in constant fear of being the Anti-Christ and my life was dictated by processing numbers, if they could be made into a 6 or a series of sixes, I was terrified, but if it could be made into a seven I took this as a sign of goodness. I was particularly obsessed with the sequence 1 2 3. Add them, 6, multiply them, 6, divide them, 6. 123 haunted me everywhere I went. At least 6 times a day. At 12:33 and 1:23 and 11:23 I would debate suicide, if all this was God’s way of showing me His plan for me, my best way to serve His Kingdom, was to fulfill the role of the Anti-Christ, then I would have to kill myself before that happened. But if I killed myself I would be trying to defy God’s plan, which I thought meant I couldn’t go to Heaven. But I was also certain the Anti-Christ wouldn’t get to go to Heaven either. The argument would go on endlessly. All I knew for certain is that I wanted to want God with all my heart, and wanted to want to serve Him with all my heart mind and soul. I just could never feel like I did. My mind raced all day and all night. I was obsessed with numbers, my version of alchemy and cosmology by day and astronomy and physics by night. I had to understand everything. I tried to overdose on sleeping pills. I went for weeks with nearly no sleep. I lived out of my truck, and tried to keep up studies at UT. I was camping most of the time at whichever local campsite I happened upon or else crashing with random people and keeping up with school whenever I came across a place with Wi-Fi.
     The only thing that gave me any hope was I had made a new friend. His name was Ian Berry. He was in one of my English classes. He prayed for me before our final. There was no way I could pass. I don’t know if it was Ian’s prayer or the all-nighters I pulled, but somehow I got a B on the final. I think it was a combination of the two. But seeing prayer work… was amazing. It gave me hope that someone would care enough to pray out loud in a class room right before a very stressful final. And even more so that, maybe God didn’t hate me after all, because He answered some one’s prayer for me. It gave me hope that maybe I wasn’t the Anti-Christ after all.
     After finals (I got a 1.3 that semester), I embarked on my “Journey”. Me, a tent, some weed, and the open road. One week I camped on the boarder of Texas and Mexico, by a river called “The Devil’s”, near Del Rio, and then drove over night to Colorado, where I spent the weekend. This is also where I meet Lola. Lola was a giant black dog. At the time I knew she was somehow significant, either a guardian or a fiend sent from either God or the Devil. But for all my fearful thought, all I cared about was that I wasn’t alone and she followed me everywhere I went. I wanted to take her with me. But how to feed a dog that weighed more than I did? With death? I heard that such a dog is an omen of death. I couldn’t decide if death would be divine deliverance or devastating. I longed to die, but also feared it. If I could die, then I wouldn’t live on to become that Anti-Christ.
     When I returned to Austin I became convinced I would die at 27 or 25, but knew if I made it past 25, I would have to make it until 27 to avoid 6. I had always said I wanted die at 27 when I was young because my heroes were Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix and Tupac. But after the camping trip I was convinced of it. I began to attend mass. The first time I went I was very stoned and stood out like a sore thumb as a non-Catholic because I didn’t know any of the rules. I displayed this by taking the Lord’s Supper. After he placed the wafer on my tongue, I waited with my mouth open for the next guy to pour the wine. It was awkward, thankfully the person behind me in line whispered “you gotta take it.” Something about that phrase echoed through my mind. You gotta take it. I had to take it. I couldn’t wait for my cup to be poured into my mouth. I had to take my cup and drink it. Just like Jesus did. I realized I had some power of choice. I knew I had to try with all my might to reach out for God with the time I had left. I was only 21… I had 6 years to make myself not be the Anti-Christ. After that, I went to the gift shop and bought a rosary and wore it around my neck faithfully. I didn’t know what you were supposed to do with a rosary, but I decided I would use it to memorize scriptures and assigned a verse to each bead. And this was when my mind began to heal. The obsession with numbers was less pervasive in my life because it had to share brain space with constant memorization and constant prayer. In the following year I used the rosary every bus ride, every time I wasn’t in class or studying or speaking with someone. As fall approached, I realized I needed to find a place to live for the fall. Some place where I wouldn’t be alone. Because I hoped this might keep the devil from tormenting me all night, every night. I prayed to live with my new friend Ian. I thought if God answers his prayers, he might be able to help me too. I was ecstatic when he asked me to live with him over the phone. But his roommates decided that they didn’t want to violate the terms of the lease. I felt like God dangled a string of hope but yanked it away.

(Fall 2010)
But God also works miracles. During the summer of 2010, living out of my truck, using the internet as I found Wi-Fi hotspots, a man wrote something to save me on my Facebook. “Hey, I’ve been enjoying reading your statuses lately; you wanna get together for coffee?” And so we met up and had coffee. We talked for hours and were naturally comfortable with each other, which is rare. That same night, he offered me to stay in his room, thus providing me a place to live and reducing his rent considerably. We had gotten on so wonderfully, it seemed like God’s plan. I was overcome with thankfulness and moved in for the fall. I loved the other roommates as well. Daniel, the artist. Lanelle, the hilarious one. Rachel, the musician. And Alex, the one who tied us all together. It seemed like a dream come true at first. We decided to do house church together and be like family to one another. I was finally in a Christian family.

      But things didn’t pan out. The man whose room I shared had a past; an incompatible past to mine. One day he asked me if I tried to molest him in his sleep. I was shocked; the idea of physical contact with another human being had disgusted me since I was twelve. That’s why images of women I would never actually come in contact with seemed perfect, they couldn’t touch me, I couldn’t touch them, but they were beautiful. I remembered him standing over my bed one night, but didn’t think anything of it, assuming he slept walked. But now that sex was brought into the mix I became terrified. Then my housemates Dan and Alex began talking to me about my roommate’s past. As it turned out he had been caught molesting men in their sleep before.

    So there I was, with no options for living, confronted with a roommate who sexually abused people with my past of being sexually abused. The Universe, The Great Spirit of Life, or God (however you want to describe it) has certainly got a sense of Irony. Thankfully I had not been able to sleep in years, so staying awake through the night to make sure he never touched me wasn’t such a large deviance form the norm. That semester we became very close. We shared everything together, him being the only person I felt I could trust with my past, and I being the same to him. We fell into a sort of love, as I seem to do with every person I meet. With tears of joy in our eyes, and arms around each other, we burned his flash drive which held videos of his victims while they showered. And together we worked through my struggles of hatred for those that hurt others sexually. He taught me how to love the people I previously had hated.

    But there was still a problem. As he and I grew closer, the house began to fall apart. There were two factions, Alex and Llanelle versus Daniel and Rachel. I couldn’t handle the constant anger between the two and couldn’t understand where it came from. I felt like a child between two parents who had just divorced, constantly walking on egg shells and trying to make peace between two who hated one another. Why? I never understood why. But it seemed to start with conflict over Llanelle and Alex’s irritation over the lack of cleanliness of Dan and Rachel. By this I mean they didn’t do their own dishes. But trying to conduct house church like this tore my brain in half, again. The stress overcame me and I left them in the winter of 2010.

    The Spring of 2011 was a blur of school, alcohol, sleeping pills, pain killers and synthetic weed. Even to this day all I remember is that my breakfast usually consisted of pills and beer and a few bong rips before I left for school and the same routine before doing homework until I went to sleep. Wash, rinse, repeat. Sleeping pills, pain killers and alcohol became the only way to stay calm enough to get through the day. Constant prayer and Bible reading was the only way to get through the night. There’s a quote from the film “Fight Club” that sums it up perfectly. “With insomnia day and night merge together
 It became difficult to differentiate reality from waking dreams. The dreams felt like the rape, war and violence I experienced as a child. The rest was a sea of foreign languages that I somehow understood without knowing how. There movie that summed me up nicely. The Matrix. In the film Neo jumps from a balcony but the concrete beneath turned to a trampoline upon impact. Why couldn’t I end my life? I had fainted so many times while driving, been in so many near wrecks, overdosed religiously, yet still I lived. I started to wonder about alternate dimensions in which the soul continues after the body had died. Was I experiencing the same reality as the people around me that I perceived as real? How could I know for sure that there was only one reality in life? Was I alive or dead or both? Everything became grey.  But at the end of it, once again I found myself without a home, without a source of income and without any clue where I would land. All I could do way pray that God would provide shelter for the next semester and give me a way to fulfill the work He had set out for me, that being school. I had become nearly fluent in Farsi over the last year and so I decided to move on to Arabic, Tajik and Russian in the fall of 2011. I had no idea the effects this would have on my brain.

(Summer 2011)
I had signed up for an immersion program in Farsi to solidify my proficiency in the language before I began studying Arabic, Tajik and Russian. But before than began I realized I needed to see more of America. So I embarked on a journey, just me and my tent and my stuffed dog named “Timber” and a ½ pound of weed and some magic mushrooms.
    The first place I camped was a park in a town called Castroville. I set up my tent and then played basketball for a few hours. I had just had my blood drawn before leaving and felt near to fainting while I played. But as I remember it that was the best basketball I had ever played. After that I went on a nature hike and remember the flowers seeming as eyes to me, as the eye of God watching me. This gave me comfort as I began my journey. At the end of this hike I happened upon a giant, whitewashed stone cross. It mesmerized me. I stayed there for a few hours praying. Then when it became fully dark at night, I continued my hike. I had never seen so many fire flies. I walked the bed of a dried up river and was surrounded by fire flies. In my mind they were angels of God sent to protect me; though that could’ve been the drugs. But who’s to say God can’t sent fireflies to comfort someone the same as angels if He is fully aware of their state of mind (omniscience). So maybe angels can be fireflies from time to time. Or I’m crazy. I don’t know, maybe. From there I repeated my previous camping journey, this time victorious. I went from Mexico to Colorado only sleeping at the camp sights I found along the way.
    It was during this time that I came to a very important conclusion. The mind has been described as a series of circuits much like that of a computer. I think a more tangible analogy is that the pathways of the brain are similar to riverbeds. The rivers of the human mind are plotted out by the environmental influences and belief structures of the individual. The more one allows their mind energy to “flow” with in the ingrained pathways, or “river beds” the deeper and more absolute those thought patterns become. So a person who was born in Texas, lived in Texas all their life and only received stimuli from the Texan environment will have deeply dug river beds. The same as a person who’s lived all their life in the slums of Afrika will have a set pattern for thinking, also referred to as their “worldview”. But the saving grace for these functions of the human mind is that the individual does possess the ability to choose where they spend their cognitive energies. Meaning, even if the person has a very deep river bed in one worldview, if they are willing and disciplined enough, they will be able to “dam” off their thoughts from that pathway and re-direct them into another current of thought, thus deepening the thought patterns of another world view and expanding his or her ability to perceive the world and look at it from multiple points of view. With these thoughts in mind I came to the conclusion that I had either become so detached from reality that I was living in my own alternate dimension, or I my life experience of globetrotting and alternate states of mind had tuned me into a more universal “frequency” of perception. My formative years had been spent in the wealthy suburbs of Dallas, Texas. They had also been spent in the povertous slums of a plethora of third world nations around the globe, from the Middle East, to Afrika, to third world Europe, to Asia. I had experienced every state of mind I could find and I experimented in every infrastructure of religion (belief) that I could fathom. Also, I became convinced that because the human mind is primarily linguistic, and our linguistic capabilities are what separate us from the animal kingdom, that learning languages other than my own would broaden my mind’s ability to perceive the world even further. Effectively damming off my usual riverbeds and carving out new ones. But I began to wonder, at what point do the rivers merge into a lake of confusion or enlightenment? Or both? Was I insane, or rather, disconnected from the shared perceptual plane of other people? Or was I more in tune than the people I knew? Whatever the circumstance truly was, all I knew is things seemed to follow my thought trains. Meaning, the dreams I had seemed to happen in reality the next day. The words floating through my mind during conversation were repeated by the person with whom I spoke. The trajectories of cars, and people, and things, seemed to precede their actual movements in reality in my mind. I felt more in touch with every minor detail of my existence, but at the same time fearful I had been cut off and was alone. Nonverbal communication became far louder than verbal. The muscles twitch on someone’s face, or the momentary movement of their eye told me far more of what was going on inside their mind then their mouth. I became aware of how often people say what they know they’re expected to say even though their selves felt the opposite. To this day I struggle with this question.

(Summer/Fall 2011)
Finally my friend Ian’s offer came to fruition. It may have been a year late, but I was overcome with joy that he and his roommates re-offered a room in their house to me. I was sad because my understanding of the situation was that because Ian had graduated and was vacating his room a year before the expiration of the lease he had signed, I would sublet his room from him. I was deeply saddened that I wouldn’t be able to experience daily life with my best friend, Ian. But at the same time I was overjoyed at the prospect of experiencing life in what was described to me as “a Christian community”. Maybe now I would finally get to be involved in a family like house church full of love, support, compassion and gentleness. A place I could heal in. But when the day came for me to move in, it turned out my room had been rented to someone else. So I was assigned to share a room with a different roommate. One I had no foundation with. Because of my insomnia and fear of attacks in the night, I elected to live in his closet because that door had a lock.  
     After the summer ended, my room became available to me. The house was empty, so I moved the previous tenant’s belongs out for him and moved mine in and deep cleaned the house floors, kitchen and bathroom. I thought I was finally at home. The semester began and I was deep in the study of Farsi, Arabic and Tajik. All of those languages are closely related, this meant that the sounds of the characters in Arabic and Farsi’s shared alphabet had to take on duel identities in my mind, while I had to learn how to simultaneously code switch the shared vocabulary of Farsi and Tajik from the Arabic script and spelling to the Cyrillic script, which also required I assign duel sound identities to the majority of the characters I had become familiar with in the English language. While I loved this work very much, it required constant mental disciple. From morning to night my mind had to sort through the various vocabularies, sentence structures, grammatical rules, of these languages simultaneously. My free time was dedicated to learning as much Russian vocabulary I was able to absorb. At times I felt as though I wasn’t able to communicate in any of the languages. At other times I would be chatting with an Iranian, and Arab and Tajik in their native tongues and scripts on Facebook while talking to my roommates in English at the same time and felt fluent in all of them. It became very tedious typing in multiple scripts with the same keyboard. The F key now had four functions depending on the context. This is a good example of how my entire mind felt. But in that time I finally learned how to be at peace in the storm. Effectively, I found the eye of the tornado and learned how to stay there. I was at peace with the transformations going on in my mind. Language learning had given me the ability to code switch between multiple world views without feeling anxiety over the lack of stability in my thought life. I learned to not care if I was crazy or not, all that mattered was drinking the cup God had set before me, that is, fulfilling the plans He had for me in my short time on earth. So if I was crazy, it was only for one stage in the eternal saga of my life. This life seemed to me as basic training, or two a days, while life post mortem became simulative to the war itself, or the football match itself. Thus, every experience simply became preparation for the next life. This gave me peace. As the semester drew to a close, a myriad of medical and familial emergencies required that I spend some time with my family in San Antonio. And it was in this time that I was born.

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