This narrative is schizophrenic. I did not wish it to be
so, and I fought its insistent encroachments, but I fear
it is a necessary component. My tale is so Eternal
Sunshine, my memories so Philip K. Dick in their
blistering lack of comfort and cohesion, and in their
dizzy mix of absolutes, uncertainties, duplicities,
fantasies, theories, and sorrow, sorrow. I did not wish
it to be so, but if my wishes had any influence over
this, then I would not be writing it; I did not wish to
have the life that required it be written.
In the mushroom trip I endured one endless night in
February, I went insane, or I understood that I was
insane, or I stabilized after a number of months
during which I incorrectly assumed myself to be
sane. I was paralyzed with fear, set upon by
unquestioning paranoia, miserably awaiting attack
from all directions, from all entities in range, human,
inanimate, immobile…as I recall saying repeatedly, “I
am terrified of everything.”
I was out with my friend Victor at the beginning. We
ate the mushrooms at my apartment, then set out for
a dance club just as we were starting to feel the
effects, and I was fine for the early phase. Once we
were on the dance floor, though, I realized I was
having trouble coping with the stroboscopic
cacophony, the loud music, spinning lights, my brain’s
sudden onslaught of static, and my mushroom-
induced determination to consider every iota of
information with equal concentration.
I tried to close my eyes to eliminate the factor of the
sensory data crowding my mind, to focus on my
thoughts for a brief moment…but my mind’s eye
must have been bored with my eyes closed, because
I was busily weaving kaleidoscopes in the
darkness…they may have been pretty and harmless
to me when I was not aware of them, but taking
notice of the phenomenon effectively turned it into a
toxic element: first, I lost all grasp of whatever thought
I’d been working on, then I lost control (if I’d ever had
it) of the flow of the patterns. They ceased to be
random and organized like soldiers to attack my
equilibrium. I was initially mesmerized with fear once
I saw the patterns congealing into nightmare demons
of my psyche, memories and fears about to torment
me in vivid detail, and my panic grew, and I thought
desperately If only I could escape this, I’m a captive
audience, and the screen is too immense, I can’t
even avert my eyes!
I opened my eyes in reflex, and amazingly, the
horrorshow was vanquished, allowing the briefest
sense of safety before the almost immediate
revelation of the new danger, as I remembered the
sensory overload that had forced me to hide behind
closed eyelids. Of course, if the sensory stimuli were
merely distracting and confusing before, now my
brain had armed itself and was able to attack by
proxy. Suddenly, I realized I was watching the room’s
own shapes and shadows coalesce and take up the
psychodrama I had just fled. In terror, I closed my
eyes, and of course, the delay was barely
perceptible; my mind’s eye soldiers were back on the
march. I opened my eyes, closed them, again,
again…I was getting perilously unsteady and fearful.
I realized I was not going to improve and would, in
fact, almost certainly get a lot worse, so I prevailed
upon Victor to take me back home.
The early downward spiral of the trip was deliberately
recounted in detail to prepare the reader to follow me
into the vital occurrences that followed. The rest of
the journey home continued in perpetual, exhausting
fear. The one point I cannot expect will resonate for
any who have not had the unique experience of a bad
trip is this: no good trip can prepare you for a bad
one. They are nothing alike. A good trip is a
pleasant diversion, a vacation from mundane daily
life, and there is never a moment in which you forget
you have taken a drug. You are perceiving things
differently and you may have an idea that you could
be seeing deeper levels of reality than normal life
allows, but you are never under the impression that
you are not “just tripping.” Never having had a bad
time before, I had no concept of how it could happen.
But that night, I was not able to distinguish anymore
the difference between how I was aware of the world
then and how I might have been aware of it without a
massive dose of psilocybin in my system. I was not
able to imagine any other reality than the one I was
perceiving. I never thought about the drug’s
influence. I didn’t think about the drug. I would have
been incapable of comprehending any argument
offered to me that I needed to “shake it off” or “snap
out of it,” because it was not a substance, it was my
life, my reality, and nothing was false. The world was
scary and bleak, because Chris wasn’t there. Chris
had never been with me at that club, so it lacked any
sense of him, and it saddened me. I was desperate
to be only in a place where he and I had been
together, inexplicably afraid to be anywhere else,
inconsolable when I thought of the life we would never
live together; this place was symbolic of that
sadness. I could be there only because he was
gone, and that suddenly felt cruel. I wished for our
life, and I needed to be in our bed. When I went
home, though, the terror just narrowed to its
inevitable focus; I was plunged into a brain-searing
labyrinth of Chris.
--enter the building with Victor leading me, and into
the hallway, the stairs, and rounding the midpoint of
the one flight we must ascend I am suddenly blasted
back into reality—I am here with Chris and it is a year
ago, and I am saddened and sickened by the lead
weight of dread at walking up these stairs with Chris
implacably leading me by the hand, I am nauseatingly
aware and unbelievably resigned to the
understanding that when we get into the apartment
he will fuck me in the ass and make it humiliating and
make it hurt and demand that I compliment and thank
him for doing so. I am deeply saddened by this
knowledge, and apparently my feet lose their
momentum, because
--now Victor is turning to look at me curiously, Why
have I slowed down?, and he gently gives a reminder
tug on my hand. I follow obediently, grateful for a
moment I am not going to face the ordeal I had just
been so fearful of, then stop still and begin to fall to
the floor and sob hysterically, because the knowledge
of Chris’ absence crashes in as if it had just
happened. The brief moment of believing he was
there with me had been absolutely convincing, and so
the ensuing correction of that idea undoes me
completely. Tortured with the fresh ache of losing
him, I hear the banshee wail. I try reflexively to fold
around the infinite aching empty space at my center,
to contain it, but it is too vast, and I keep folding
myself tinier tinier tinier until I exist at right angles to
myself and to everything around me, folded like
origami and barely visible to the casual observer, and
then I am aware I made myself too small, too
helpless…as I begin to fall into the empty space I
folded myself around; it will swallow me up, serves
me right and
--now Victor is coaxing me to open my eyes, and now
he stretches me out from the pretzel I have contorted
into, positions me instead in a supine position, puts
his arms around me from behind, holds me while I
cry. And now it is a year ago and Chris is behind me
on the miserable floor in Allentown, and the air
mattress is not that deflated yet, but a few ass-
fucking minutes and my tear-soaked face will be
pressed into the hard floor beneath the rapidly
deflating mattress. I announce my anguished
realization that we are back in Allentown or maybe
still there and I have hallucinated ever leaving? Or I
am not merely hallucinating but full-blown insane, and
I have been in a mental ward all this time, and Chris,
my loving husband, is waiting for me to recover and
come home to him, and really this makes the most
comforting sense, I think peacefully, because I would
have to be crazy to imagine Chris had ever hurt me,
let alone that he had been so relentlessly vicious and
sadistic, that was impossible so I must be crazy,
which is good news, because I just have to get better
and then I can be with Chris
--but now Victor’s perplexed challenges to the talk of
Allentown have shattered that delusion, and I close
my eyes miserably feeling that I have again
rediscovered the loss of Chris and the empty space
begins to pull me downward again, which brings the
sudden clarity that I am dead, which only makes
sense really, it has to be true and how did I ever not
know this? After all, I knew I couldn’t live without
Chris, and he isn’t here, so how could it have taken
this long to realize I’m dead? But if he isn’t here, it is
because we did live through the nightmare memories
I cannot accept as being part of the same life as my
love with Chris…if the nightmare was true, I don’t
know why I should be dead without him; if the
nightmare was false, then he has to be here; he is not
here, therefore I am dead, but where is he and why?
And my brain tumbles on end. This feels like auto-
cannibalism
--and Orange is trying to reach me through my haze
of concentration and confusion, to what else? To fuck
with my head, fuck you, fuck you, I know it’s you,
Orange, Chris, I know you’ve been here all along, you
never left you just made me believe you did, but you’
ve been here the whole time, making me crazy,
making me see other faces when I look at you so I
won’t know it’s still you, but fuck you motherfucker
you can’t fool me anymore! And he sounds really
unsettled now as he asks why I would think he was
Chris. I explain the truth as I know it from a minute
ago: See, Chris, you and I can’t be without each
other, and I’m still alive, therefore you’re here,
because I love you so much, and you’re—you’re
fucking with my head and I know it! Fuck you you evil
piece of shit you psychotic monster what are you
doing here?, you just keep torturing me and you killed
my husband, I start crying suddenly instead of
screaming, you killed Chris and he’s gone and you
won’t kill me you just stay here and keep me alive by
still being him but you’re not him you’re not him and I
hate you! I start shrieking again, I hate you and you
can’t keep hurting me, I’ll kill you, I’ll shoot you full of
insulin in your sleep you evil fuck!
--my thrashing and shrieking hysteria has become too
much for Victor to bear and he tries to hold me down
and calm me. In his low, soothing tones, I hear Chris’
voice, and I try desperately to find that Chris is really
there…I ask hopefully, Chris? My heart foolishly
beams with a searchlight to find him, but Victor says,
No, it’s Victor, and I mournfully cry out No! and my
tears pour anew. This repeats several times, and I
am helplessly filled with hope every time I ask,
Chris? And I flail and cry and mourn him freshly
every time Victor reasserts his identity until I find
myself resenting Victor so angrily, and wishing he
would just tell me he was Chris and then fuck me
while I was happily deluded that I was getting to be
with my husband again, the only thing I wanted in the
world, even just for a night, even if it wasn’t true….
--and so I find myself talking about some of my fears
and dark notions of the damage Chris has done to
me, sometimes I am talking to Chris, sometimes to
Victor, sometimes to an unknown audience, and I
confess that I am what Chris has made me, that he
trained me thoroughly, I am his puppet, his slave, his
slut. I am programmed and I cannot change my
code; he has made me into his perfect whore, and I
am reduced to a sexually ravenous cockhound, my
cunt instantly dripping wet and my ass in the air to be
filled for any hard dick I can find, that I feel the
emptiness of my holes, that the emptiness defines
me, and that really means the holes define me, so
your project was successful, Chris, come back and
use me until I die from overuse, come back and
make it okay that I am what you made me, because I
can’t live with myself this way if I’m not with you, you’
re the only way this is acceptable, but you’re gone,
and so I will make myself worthy of you by living up to
your ideal version of me so fully you’ll know how
much I love you, I will be as slutty and low as your
worst ideas and I will degrade myself and take the
cocks of all the men who want to fuck me, and I’ll be
doing it so we can be together, because Chris, I can’t
live with myself, I can’t be what you made me and be
okay with that, and I need you back, but I’ll hate you if
you come back while I have self-respect, so I’ll have
to take all these guys fucking me in order to degrade
myself enough to accept you. I’ll do it for you.
The night went on and on, and I intermittently believed
I was insane, dead, condemned to a life of
compulsive promiscuity and perversion either as self-
flagellation, or as a means of winning Chris back, or
to make myself so used to the pain and shame that
when it was at least my husband rather than anyone
else, I would be grateful, or as a true preference
perhaps, an inevitable result of being twisted so
systematically by Chris that I’d been irrevocably
perverted, and whether or not I could deal with it,
perhaps I really was just a kinky whore now…each
reality I inhabited was equally convincing, and I was
unable to see any as improbable or impossible, even
with the changes coming so regularly. Each true
understanding of my situation was so absolute that I
accepted each as true now and forever, with no doubt
that I had ever been any other way than the latest
revelation. I am insane; I have been insane; I will be
insane…I am a twisted, depraved whore; I have been
and will be a whore…. The only real unifying factor
was the emotional desperation fueling the dementia:
I will fight my way back to you, Chris. I will do
anything, be anything…I have been without you, and
that is not an acceptable life. When I stare down the
barrel of years without you, I wish to accept any
conceivable alternative. It is not worth it to have my
life, sanity, sexual self-determination, or self-respect,
if having these means not having you. I won the
battle last summer because I am a strong warrior, but
I would do anything to change it…what victory did I
win? I broke my restraints, and after the momentary
rush of seeing myself as the conqueror, looked down
at hands that were broken and crushed and would
never hold anything again….
I cried into the night, talking to Chris as if he were
there, begging to be his wife as I knew I should be,
promising never again to fight what I knew to be my
destiny if I could just have it back…at some point I
slipped into unconsciousness, a temporary respite
from the torture of my mind, the anguish of my heart,
the desolation of my soul.
so, and I fought its insistent encroachments, but I fear
it is a necessary component. My tale is so Eternal
Sunshine, my memories so Philip K. Dick in their
blistering lack of comfort and cohesion, and in their
dizzy mix of absolutes, uncertainties, duplicities,
fantasies, theories, and sorrow, sorrow. I did not wish
it to be so, but if my wishes had any influence over
this, then I would not be writing it; I did not wish to
have the life that required it be written.
In the mushroom trip I endured one endless night in
February, I went insane, or I understood that I was
insane, or I stabilized after a number of months
during which I incorrectly assumed myself to be
sane. I was paralyzed with fear, set upon by
unquestioning paranoia, miserably awaiting attack
from all directions, from all entities in range, human,
inanimate, immobile…as I recall saying repeatedly, “I
am terrified of everything.”
I was out with my friend Victor at the beginning. We
ate the mushrooms at my apartment, then set out for
a dance club just as we were starting to feel the
effects, and I was fine for the early phase. Once we
were on the dance floor, though, I realized I was
having trouble coping with the stroboscopic
cacophony, the loud music, spinning lights, my brain’s
sudden onslaught of static, and my mushroom-
induced determination to consider every iota of
information with equal concentration.
I tried to close my eyes to eliminate the factor of the
sensory data crowding my mind, to focus on my
thoughts for a brief moment…but my mind’s eye
must have been bored with my eyes closed, because
I was busily weaving kaleidoscopes in the
darkness…they may have been pretty and harmless
to me when I was not aware of them, but taking
notice of the phenomenon effectively turned it into a
toxic element: first, I lost all grasp of whatever thought
I’d been working on, then I lost control (if I’d ever had
it) of the flow of the patterns. They ceased to be
random and organized like soldiers to attack my
equilibrium. I was initially mesmerized with fear once
I saw the patterns congealing into nightmare demons
of my psyche, memories and fears about to torment
me in vivid detail, and my panic grew, and I thought
desperately If only I could escape this, I’m a captive
audience, and the screen is too immense, I can’t
even avert my eyes!
I opened my eyes in reflex, and amazingly, the
horrorshow was vanquished, allowing the briefest
sense of safety before the almost immediate
revelation of the new danger, as I remembered the
sensory overload that had forced me to hide behind
closed eyelids. Of course, if the sensory stimuli were
merely distracting and confusing before, now my
brain had armed itself and was able to attack by
proxy. Suddenly, I realized I was watching the room’s
own shapes and shadows coalesce and take up the
psychodrama I had just fled. In terror, I closed my
eyes, and of course, the delay was barely
perceptible; my mind’s eye soldiers were back on the
march. I opened my eyes, closed them, again,
again…I was getting perilously unsteady and fearful.
I realized I was not going to improve and would, in
fact, almost certainly get a lot worse, so I prevailed
upon Victor to take me back home.
The early downward spiral of the trip was deliberately
recounted in detail to prepare the reader to follow me
into the vital occurrences that followed. The rest of
the journey home continued in perpetual, exhausting
fear. The one point I cannot expect will resonate for
any who have not had the unique experience of a bad
trip is this: no good trip can prepare you for a bad
one. They are nothing alike. A good trip is a
pleasant diversion, a vacation from mundane daily
life, and there is never a moment in which you forget
you have taken a drug. You are perceiving things
differently and you may have an idea that you could
be seeing deeper levels of reality than normal life
allows, but you are never under the impression that
you are not “just tripping.” Never having had a bad
time before, I had no concept of how it could happen.
But that night, I was not able to distinguish anymore
the difference between how I was aware of the world
then and how I might have been aware of it without a
massive dose of psilocybin in my system. I was not
able to imagine any other reality than the one I was
perceiving. I never thought about the drug’s
influence. I didn’t think about the drug. I would have
been incapable of comprehending any argument
offered to me that I needed to “shake it off” or “snap
out of it,” because it was not a substance, it was my
life, my reality, and nothing was false. The world was
scary and bleak, because Chris wasn’t there. Chris
had never been with me at that club, so it lacked any
sense of him, and it saddened me. I was desperate
to be only in a place where he and I had been
together, inexplicably afraid to be anywhere else,
inconsolable when I thought of the life we would never
live together; this place was symbolic of that
sadness. I could be there only because he was
gone, and that suddenly felt cruel. I wished for our
life, and I needed to be in our bed. When I went
home, though, the terror just narrowed to its
inevitable focus; I was plunged into a brain-searing
labyrinth of Chris.
--enter the building with Victor leading me, and into
the hallway, the stairs, and rounding the midpoint of
the one flight we must ascend I am suddenly blasted
back into reality—I am here with Chris and it is a year
ago, and I am saddened and sickened by the lead
weight of dread at walking up these stairs with Chris
implacably leading me by the hand, I am nauseatingly
aware and unbelievably resigned to the
understanding that when we get into the apartment
he will fuck me in the ass and make it humiliating and
make it hurt and demand that I compliment and thank
him for doing so. I am deeply saddened by this
knowledge, and apparently my feet lose their
momentum, because
--now Victor is turning to look at me curiously, Why
have I slowed down?, and he gently gives a reminder
tug on my hand. I follow obediently, grateful for a
moment I am not going to face the ordeal I had just
been so fearful of, then stop still and begin to fall to
the floor and sob hysterically, because the knowledge
of Chris’ absence crashes in as if it had just
happened. The brief moment of believing he was
there with me had been absolutely convincing, and so
the ensuing correction of that idea undoes me
completely. Tortured with the fresh ache of losing
him, I hear the banshee wail. I try reflexively to fold
around the infinite aching empty space at my center,
to contain it, but it is too vast, and I keep folding
myself tinier tinier tinier until I exist at right angles to
myself and to everything around me, folded like
origami and barely visible to the casual observer, and
then I am aware I made myself too small, too
helpless…as I begin to fall into the empty space I
folded myself around; it will swallow me up, serves
me right and
--now Victor is coaxing me to open my eyes, and now
he stretches me out from the pretzel I have contorted
into, positions me instead in a supine position, puts
his arms around me from behind, holds me while I
cry. And now it is a year ago and Chris is behind me
on the miserable floor in Allentown, and the air
mattress is not that deflated yet, but a few ass-
fucking minutes and my tear-soaked face will be
pressed into the hard floor beneath the rapidly
deflating mattress. I announce my anguished
realization that we are back in Allentown or maybe
still there and I have hallucinated ever leaving? Or I
am not merely hallucinating but full-blown insane, and
I have been in a mental ward all this time, and Chris,
my loving husband, is waiting for me to recover and
come home to him, and really this makes the most
comforting sense, I think peacefully, because I would
have to be crazy to imagine Chris had ever hurt me,
let alone that he had been so relentlessly vicious and
sadistic, that was impossible so I must be crazy,
which is good news, because I just have to get better
and then I can be with Chris
--but now Victor’s perplexed challenges to the talk of
Allentown have shattered that delusion, and I close
my eyes miserably feeling that I have again
rediscovered the loss of Chris and the empty space
begins to pull me downward again, which brings the
sudden clarity that I am dead, which only makes
sense really, it has to be true and how did I ever not
know this? After all, I knew I couldn’t live without
Chris, and he isn’t here, so how could it have taken
this long to realize I’m dead? But if he isn’t here, it is
because we did live through the nightmare memories
I cannot accept as being part of the same life as my
love with Chris…if the nightmare was true, I don’t
know why I should be dead without him; if the
nightmare was false, then he has to be here; he is not
here, therefore I am dead, but where is he and why?
And my brain tumbles on end. This feels like auto-
cannibalism
--and Orange is trying to reach me through my haze
of concentration and confusion, to what else? To fuck
with my head, fuck you, fuck you, I know it’s you,
Orange, Chris, I know you’ve been here all along, you
never left you just made me believe you did, but you’
ve been here the whole time, making me crazy,
making me see other faces when I look at you so I
won’t know it’s still you, but fuck you motherfucker
you can’t fool me anymore! And he sounds really
unsettled now as he asks why I would think he was
Chris. I explain the truth as I know it from a minute
ago: See, Chris, you and I can’t be without each
other, and I’m still alive, therefore you’re here,
because I love you so much, and you’re—you’re
fucking with my head and I know it! Fuck you you evil
piece of shit you psychotic monster what are you
doing here?, you just keep torturing me and you killed
my husband, I start crying suddenly instead of
screaming, you killed Chris and he’s gone and you
won’t kill me you just stay here and keep me alive by
still being him but you’re not him you’re not him and I
hate you! I start shrieking again, I hate you and you
can’t keep hurting me, I’ll kill you, I’ll shoot you full of
insulin in your sleep you evil fuck!
--my thrashing and shrieking hysteria has become too
much for Victor to bear and he tries to hold me down
and calm me. In his low, soothing tones, I hear Chris’
voice, and I try desperately to find that Chris is really
there…I ask hopefully, Chris? My heart foolishly
beams with a searchlight to find him, but Victor says,
No, it’s Victor, and I mournfully cry out No! and my
tears pour anew. This repeats several times, and I
am helplessly filled with hope every time I ask,
Chris? And I flail and cry and mourn him freshly
every time Victor reasserts his identity until I find
myself resenting Victor so angrily, and wishing he
would just tell me he was Chris and then fuck me
while I was happily deluded that I was getting to be
with my husband again, the only thing I wanted in the
world, even just for a night, even if it wasn’t true….
--and so I find myself talking about some of my fears
and dark notions of the damage Chris has done to
me, sometimes I am talking to Chris, sometimes to
Victor, sometimes to an unknown audience, and I
confess that I am what Chris has made me, that he
trained me thoroughly, I am his puppet, his slave, his
slut. I am programmed and I cannot change my
code; he has made me into his perfect whore, and I
am reduced to a sexually ravenous cockhound, my
cunt instantly dripping wet and my ass in the air to be
filled for any hard dick I can find, that I feel the
emptiness of my holes, that the emptiness defines
me, and that really means the holes define me, so
your project was successful, Chris, come back and
use me until I die from overuse, come back and
make it okay that I am what you made me, because I
can’t live with myself this way if I’m not with you, you’
re the only way this is acceptable, but you’re gone,
and so I will make myself worthy of you by living up to
your ideal version of me so fully you’ll know how
much I love you, I will be as slutty and low as your
worst ideas and I will degrade myself and take the
cocks of all the men who want to fuck me, and I’ll be
doing it so we can be together, because Chris, I can’t
live with myself, I can’t be what you made me and be
okay with that, and I need you back, but I’ll hate you if
you come back while I have self-respect, so I’ll have
to take all these guys fucking me in order to degrade
myself enough to accept you. I’ll do it for you.
The night went on and on, and I intermittently believed
I was insane, dead, condemned to a life of
compulsive promiscuity and perversion either as self-
flagellation, or as a means of winning Chris back, or
to make myself so used to the pain and shame that
when it was at least my husband rather than anyone
else, I would be grateful, or as a true preference
perhaps, an inevitable result of being twisted so
systematically by Chris that I’d been irrevocably
perverted, and whether or not I could deal with it,
perhaps I really was just a kinky whore now…each
reality I inhabited was equally convincing, and I was
unable to see any as improbable or impossible, even
with the changes coming so regularly. Each true
understanding of my situation was so absolute that I
accepted each as true now and forever, with no doubt
that I had ever been any other way than the latest
revelation. I am insane; I have been insane; I will be
insane…I am a twisted, depraved whore; I have been
and will be a whore…. The only real unifying factor
was the emotional desperation fueling the dementia:
I will fight my way back to you, Chris. I will do
anything, be anything…I have been without you, and
that is not an acceptable life. When I stare down the
barrel of years without you, I wish to accept any
conceivable alternative. It is not worth it to have my
life, sanity, sexual self-determination, or self-respect,
if having these means not having you. I won the
battle last summer because I am a strong warrior, but
I would do anything to change it…what victory did I
win? I broke my restraints, and after the momentary
rush of seeing myself as the conqueror, looked down
at hands that were broken and crushed and would
never hold anything again….
I cried into the night, talking to Chris as if he were
there, begging to be his wife as I knew I should be,
promising never again to fight what I knew to be my
destiny if I could just have it back…at some point I
slipped into unconsciousness, a temporary respite
from the torture of my mind, the anguish of my heart,
the desolation of my soul.
