I Had A Dream About You

a fictional story about psychosis

          I’m a mind looking for a soul. A soul looking for a mind. The day it all started " the day that changed my life "was October 15^th, 2011. I woke up that morning with bus directions to go to my second protest instead of capoeira. I don’t remember what it felt like, the first day of the rest of my life. The day I skipped something I love so other people have rights to do what they love. I grew up in a daydream world, always off somewhere in my own head, never thinking about other people, always dreams dreams dreams. There wasn’t always a shape to my dreams, but they were always there, and reality never really tailed behind like a ghost, whispering darkly. So I was able to ignore it.

            Getting on buses was always strange for me. I was scared I would get lost, that I wouldn’t get to the destination at the end of the route. I took the bus to Oakland first, wandered around for a while. It was early morning, before other people were awake. I took some time to walk around Pitt campus. I ate something and walked around, still half asleep. Then I walked to the bus stop and waited for the bus that would take me to Freedom Corner at the Hill District, the starting point for the first march of Occupy Pittsburgh. I walked through it all awake and dreaming " dreaming of a better world to live in.

            I got out of the bus sleepy. I walked over and found a place to sit down and threw my backpack down beside me. I sat down and looked up at the sky. I counted the clouds in the sky. The blue mist in the sky, and the stardust in my eyes, hovered over me silently. If I didn’t know the earth was spinning I could have sworn everything was perfectly still.

 

I sat by the water and listened. The leaves of the trees shifted with the wind, making subtle noises.

            (A not short but not tall girl stood by the telephone, frozen. There was an ethereal glimmer in her eyes " something lost and not found. Dreams were whispering back and forth. Her face was sunken. She had long tangled black hair. She would walk back and forth staring off in the distance. There was something stirring in her eyes, I could tell. There was something quiet about her, like the wind. It’s what I did when I was in the hospital. Watching her, the way Victor and I watched each other. (Watching me, watching you.)

            She lay on the bed staring at the nurses.

            “Grandma, grandma, don’t leave me!” she whispered, momentarily mistaking the nurse for her grandmother. Her eyes were wide. She would just sit there, staring.

            There was something fragile about her. She barely ever talked, and when she did, it was with a voice so soft that no one could hear her.

            There was something different about her. Rumors were that she was schizophrenic (like you, he said), but I was guessing she was seeing or hearing things that were real, like I was. That she unconsciously knew to be quiet about it. Or maybe she was just crazy.

            I asked her once, how are you?

            What?

            I mean, did you have a good day?

            Yes, she said.

            Even if she was just crazy, I felt bad that the doctors were taking the voices away from her, because maybe she wanted them, and her parents forced her to be there.

            It gives me things to go from, watching people like her.

I would take walks by the river and smoke weed. There was a waterfall nearby, and the water would fall as if in a dream.  I sat there trancelike, hearing whispers.

“Stay and listen,” a soft voice would say.

“We won’t hurt you.”

And the water fell. Existing in a trance of its own, outside of myself. I tried to open up my mind, imagine my brain was an empty glass, and listen to the water.

“Are you sure?” they asked.

“We can’t. You’re safe. We can protect you, if we stay.”

I sat indian style and meditated for awhile, not rushing into things. I still hadn’t given them an answer when I went into the hospital, but I told them to go away for awhile, because I thought they were after me. So I was scared.

In the other hospital I thought they were after me.  A fat women with black hair said, “The dead can’t hurt you. Worry about the living. They can hurt you.”

In the outside world, the water kept falling.

 

There was a shadow behind his face. The plants were glistening. Glowing. The young boy stood immersed in nature, his hair pulled back in a ponytail. He sang the tune of the plants. The leaves were green and bright.

Behind him I was running. I was running fast, the wind behind me, almost as if immersed in my spirit.

(We were sitting on the sidewalk in the middle of the city. Doing art. Behind them was a great tent city.)

We were running so fast. Running both from each other, and towards each other. Some other force was pushing us together.

I stopped running and sat down.

“Relax,” the boy said. Victor.

“Running relaxes me,” I said.

Behind us the branches of tall trees gently swayed with the wind. Flowers blossomed from stems shooting out of the grass. Everything was alive and listening.

(They sat under a bridge. It was dark. It was the beginning of everything. They smoked the fake stuff and then it was as if it were enveloped in each other. Whispers were everywhere. Everything else stopped and they fell into a trance. Floating in ether.  As if in a different universe. Time stopped, and everything made sense. But we forgot. We forgot that we were two different people. Our emotions, our dysfunctional families, our dreams all seemed to collide, blend into one, like a yin and yang sign that finally was immersed in water, or like one drawn with charcoal. You couldn’t tell where one end started and the other began.)

(He was running. It was a dream. Faster than normal, his heart pounding. There was something ethereal attached to him. Running. He leaped onto piles of concrete. The wind helped him along, tugging on his legs. His legs were poetry in action. He stopped, ending up up in a store, sweat dripping down his face, panicking.

I woke up, forgetting momentarily that I was in the hospital. The other boy spoke in whispers about the first time he stole something. I told him about the first time I was caught, the only time I really tried to steal something. Then I was back in my hospital bed, awake from a vivid dream.)

(I fell asleep in the tent city in the community tent. This was after the first time I dropped acid and had sex with Derrick. Suddenly I was on the ground and my brother Destin was trying to put me in a wrist-lock. I struggled, and suddenly stopped. I let him, and then he turned into Victor. I relaxed, all of the tension fell out of my body, and he just lay on top of my body. Then I woke up. I don’t have any poetic words to describe it, except that now I feel it was a prophetic dream, a sign that we would have a telepathic link.  It was so real, I thought that Victor himself had the same dream, that he had come to me in my sleep to send me a message.  I woke up  and didn’t feel like sleeping. I sat up in my sleeping bag, relaxed, thinking about things. It was the first time since dropping acid that things made sense again. Eventually I lay back down and fell back asleep.)

We sat in the middle of the forest. Calm and peaceful.

(We stood wandering in the tent city. “Do you have any plans?”

Victor asked. We had both stayed up the whole night the other night. Most of it anyways. I got a little bit of sleep, having done drugs other than weed for the first time the day before. He just couldn’t sleep. We were both hoping to stay up again to do drugs. We stayed up wandering around the tent city, awkwardly talking to people. I stood near people that I thought might want to do drugs. Alyssa had told me that she gave Aiden weed that her boss gave her, and that he was going to ask some people to smoke it with some people. I didn’t know if it was actually going to happen. It started raining, probably why it didn’t happen. A bunch of people stood under the information tent, talking. The air was nervous. It was going to happen, but then it started raining. Eventually we gave up and went to bed.

 

The trees whistle. We have walked in darkness. But there is light, somewhere. We’ll find it. A blade of grass glistens. The wind whispers softly, betraying stories of people who walked here before us. I sit and listen. The wind whispers. And it’s always the quiet ones that tell the most interesting stories. We walk with the wind. He does not want to give up his story, his secrets, but the wind takes them anyways, whistles, swirls them like spirals. It is a dance. We have come to a great dance.

(The wind swept us away that day. Something about the atmosphere released something in the four of us, and we were free. Free to dance, run with the wind, let the music be the beat of our heart. It was light-up night in downtown Pittsburgh. We listened to the Christmas carols, but we ignored that rhythm and danced to our own beat, our bodies moving around wildly as if on drugs, but none of us were. Derrick probably was.  The energy transferred, and other people started dancing.

Before, they stood still like zombies listening to a sermon. But don’t you know you’re supposed to dance to sermons, not stand there frozen, only there out of boredom, for something to do. But something else was with us, some wild thing running in our blood. Something electric and strange. And Some of the people danced with us. You could hardly call it dancing in the normal sense " it was as if our bodies were free, free to move in the way they were supposed to, as if in the wild. Nothing was there to stop us, and we turned like a wheel. It must have looked almost like we were having seizures, but it was more like we were in a trance-like state, called by the spirits to dance with the blood in our body alive. Alive and breathing. Moving vehemently.

A bunch of girls wanted to take our pictures, to capture the moment. As if a moment can be captured (It can). We paused and stood still for them, and then went back to dancing, to being wild. The best thing about it was, our inhibitions were loosened without any drugs at all. Before we started dancing, our noses had been searching for weed, having smelled it. We had wandered through the crowds of stoic people, wondering where the smell came from. It wasn’t meant to be that night. A different energy crept up in our veins and we danced as if it were the end of the world. (It wasn’t.)

Eventually I realized that my phone wasn’t in my pocket and panicked. We walked away from all of the other people and sat behind a tree where we placed our things. The tree stood sturdy and wise. Something was different about the atmosphere. There was a silent pause in the air. We didn’t find it there, and we walked back to the grassy dance floor, retracing our steps, looking for my phone. Our eyes were glued to the ground. No one paused to wonder what the people standing there listening to music were thinking. It was dark, but eventually I found my phone there, buried in the grass.

We went back to dancing. I was more careful this time, but still the energy swept us away, as if our bodies were inhabited by the spirits. (Maybe they were.)

But that’s just those silly little details. Doesn’t really capture it, does it? (It does.) NEVER LOOK BACK!  That night’s lost now. (It’s not.) (Oh, you’re writing) But it’s still in us, vibrant as fire. Glowing, because it is still a part of us, waiting to be released again.) 

And the wind still whispers. But that’s enough. It tugs on our flesh, on our barren spirits, reminding us. (The world is not barren). (I keep forgetting that you’re writing). Who we are. Reminding us who we are. (No one can tell you who you are.) “Don’t ignore your destinies,” the wind whispers. (That wasn’t the wind. But the wind whispered the same thing Aiden did: Don’t ignore your destiny. Don’t let him ignore it) And we won’t. Because he’ll keep reminding us.

The tent city we slept in is gone. Abandoned. Warriors " seekers " left it there to be toppled by the police force. Even the anarchists! (We didn’t want to. But there weren’t enough of us. We weren’t unified enough.) But we went back to it that night after dancing, our worries gone. Tired, we crawled into our separate tents. And that was how it was for months. A spirit tribe brought together by a larger family, a tent city, immersed in a real city. (It’s alive in these words! Its alive in all of us.) We slept there, wondering where the wild things go. It was bound to end, we all knew it (It wasn’t. It was.) (I need to learn how to listen). Fear was in my blood, that we’d be separated when the tent city was dismantled. I think we were all afraid of that. But we weren’t. It lives on. In our spirits. (You already wrote that.)

 

It was the day after I dropped acid with Victor and John. John said it wasn’t acid, that it was 4-aco-dmt, but maybe it was acid.  (It wasn't dmt.) I know that. But I want to try it.

We were at a folk concert for occupy pittsburgh. I sat there and listened to the music, really getting into it. Victor arrived late. I ended up watching him instead of the music. I wandered into the room he was in after the music ended. I felt awkward standing here, and I think he did too. We both wanted to talk to each other, but there wasn’t anything to say.  Eventually I asked him, “What did you end up doing last night after you left?” even though I already knew the answer. It was just something to say. I was so afraid to say we walked home because we missed the bus. (Don’t you hate it when that happens?) But I couldn’t stop staring at him. (I couldn’t either).

I stood at the bus stop watching everyone else gathering together. I felt uninvited. (You could have come with us). (That’s why you kept looking back).  He looked back at me too, probably wondering what I was doing. Eventually I got on the bus, afraid I wouldn’t know what stop to get off at.

 

It was a dream. Our dreams suddenly remembered as we talked in our sleep. Two frozen worlds collide, chasing secrets, forlorn as he remembers what he does not want to remember, so I remind him that that is not who he is, he is light, he is my light. I imagine him in his bed, his long black hair tangled sleeping dreaming my dream. I just left him there, in my head. The screen is ethereal. Our third eyes do the talking for us because we are silent souls. We are slowly learning how to dream again, sheltering each others’ dark secrets. Let it be confusing, let the symbols define us. We will meet again. We will meet again.

They tell us in this place to use positive affirmations. He is peaceful. He is wise. He is just there in the background, listening. But he’s so much more than that. The ocean gently rocks (What ocean? It’s a metaphor) and I am reminded by a starchild that we are gentle souls not meant for this world but that we should stay. But we are just there, sometimes forgetting the point of it all. (There isn’t one. There is!) Sometimes it turns into a game, and fear is the only thing that glistens on the shore. In games there are winners and losers, but this isn’t a game. (Let’s stop making it one.) In our dreams it is beautiful, just there, transcending reality, our astral bodies in contact with each other. We sing each other to sleep as our egos dissolve like waves finally breaking against the cold sea.  We don’t even realize we were there, in each others’ heads as we sleep, talking about our dreams. Then we say, it was a dream. It was a good dream, and movie interrupts real life and fear waits to take me back to my cage, frozen in this shell I borrow I wish I could keep forever. We’re too obsessed with lord of the rings. We tell each other, it’s just a movie. But it’s a good movie, and sometimes we think it’s real, or at least a theory. (That’s you.)

But it’s always changing like my light is. And in these moments I realize that Victor and I are evolving together. Our spirits are now bound to the other, beyond this lifetime it seems. It can’t be the brain, we can communicate hundreds of miles apart. I can hear you you don’t need to talk.

And he’s afraid I’ll forget about him. How could I ever forget that long dark elfin hair, how can I forget sailing away with him under the bridge? The little things slip away sometimes but catch phrases capture our personalities. (I know, right? By lord I think he’s got it.) And then it’s the game again, I don’t think life is a game, and did we ruin our chance of immortality by choosing a mortal life for each other? Oh well nothing to do about that but hope it’s just a movie, hoping Tolkien’s not the kind of guy who’d spill important secrets and he was just crazy enough to make the whole thing up. But any fiction writer knows that it’s never really completely fiction.

 

A black thing flashed in front of my eyes. We were going in and out of each others’ brains. It was like there was another presence there, electric. And the thing flashed by, maybe a demon leaving, like we were being exorcised. Or something he accidentally sent me. But really it had to have been something other than us doing it. And we just lay there trancelike, in each others’ heads, no thoughts, just a strange sensation. I was sort of having closed-eye visuals.  That’s all I remember of it, except that entering something else, like being lowered into a tank. But I don’t really remember. (Neither do I). But it must have been some sort of cleansing. I focused on seeing a white light, and I sent it to him, imagined it embracing him, and it embracing me, and he saw it. (I did.)

 

It doesn’t make sense to me, the way darkness moves, when there could be light and love. You could try to live forever and hate life because you aren’t one with everything, you don’t feel harmonious, or you can live in the moment and develop spiritually, work on becoming more aware of goodness, of God, of nature, flowers, trees, listen to their whispers and have the courage to go.

 

He told me to take the antipsychotic. I wondered why. Because he was scared he was going to try to kill me again, or because he wanted me to ignore my destiny to become a shamon? I’m not saying that’s my destiny, but we can read each others’ minds. That means something. I’m not a person who believes in coincidences. If we can read each others’ minds, then maybe we really are that important. It’s not a delusion.

I remember that day in the hospital. I felt a sort of presence in my chest as I was waking up. I forget if I was awake or asleep, actually.

 

The hotel. We just stayed in the hotel for free. Not really for free, Lenny’s parents paid for it. Victor and I went there in the hotel, by that I mean, we smoked the fake stuff. We hid in the staircase as he packed a bowl. I’m forgetting it all. Because of the damn anti-psychotic. It’s taking away my natural ability to write. But he told me to take it. I listened to him because I trust him.

Everything made sense. We talked about how dmt is something special, something that’s shared. We talked about the psychonaut world, that you go to different realms, and how his friend preferred to sit and watch TV after smoking dmt, and that how did that make any sense at all? So he told me that he walked into the forest to smoke it, but he forgot to bring his bowl so he had to walk all the way back to the house, and all the way back to the forest.

We stood there just floating. Our brains off somewhere else, and something else took its place. I wonder what to call that zone. Parallel universe. It makes sense. We stood there outside for  a while. John thought the security guard had caught us. I was about to pretend to smoke, just incase the security guard was still watching. But then we slipped into that space. We were floating in space. Then we went inside and looked at the pamphlets about the outdoors, and I realized that I never really explored Pittsburgh, the part of Pittsburgh that is wooded, the caverns and the waters, never really went out of the city, and that I wanted to.

John came down and saw us. We said we were going to stay down here for a while. We stood there sort of looking at pamphlets sort of floating way too high to really be doing anything at all. Then Victor went to make hot chocolate and I followed and did the same thing because I didn’t really know what to do and at the time it made sense. It just made sense. My body almost wasn’t there, I could barely function. (I could tell.)

Eventually we went back up to the hotel room. I don’t really remembered what happened.

 

Then there was the time I went dumpster diving when still sort of affected by molly I had done earlier. At least it felt like it was still in my system. The rest of them were asleep, doped up, some of them at least, so I was the one to go get food. I remember when I got back and I saw Victor laying there sleeping, he looked so peaceful and beautiful, and I was just so happy that I was able to find food for everyone to eat. I felt harmonious. Even though the next morning Victor and Derrick realized that there were holes in the bread I found and that bugs must have eaten through them, but I had eaten them anyways. So what? It didn’t kill me.  Food is food. But I should have used the flashlight, but at the time I felt so empowered that I was actually finding food, that I didn’t take the time to be careful.

I’m not really capturing the moment. It was so long ago. And I don’t remember. But the essence of it was: I thought I finally found a family. That’s what it felt like, I sat alone being the only one awake. Everyone was serene and peaceful, and so was I. I don’t remember what happened when they woke up. But it was late, and I made myself a sandwich with the bread and tomatoes I found, and sat there eating it.

The hotel. It wasn’t really free. But for us it was. Someone paid for it.

 

Then there was the time Victor and I were downloading a movie to watch after smoking the fake stuff. We were going to lay down together and watch it, but then Derrick came back with molly, and drugs make me want to meditate and develop spiritually.

“You’re just going to meditate?” he asked, and part of me felt bad, because I wanted to spend time with him and just him, but Derrick was there anyways which ruined it. Because we were going to watch that movie together.

It started with me feeling floaty. I had a headache. I began to worry about overdosing. Victor put psychedelic music on my computer and I started meditating with my eyes closed. I sat in front of the window. When a song with forest sounds came on, I started to hear wind and rain. I heard that for most of the experience, even when the song changed, so I knew it wasn’t just the music. It felt like I was on the top of a building in the dark and it was a big rainstorm, but a peaceful rainstorm. I felt safe and not in danger. Eventually, the wind and rain started to feel like a white tunnel that I was floating through " the white tunnel was an actual feeling, like something was coursing through my body. I could see it. It wasn’t a repeated thought like the building metaphor that I created once hearing the wind and rain. I felt pulled by the wind and the rain " I relaxed into it. This was positive rain, positive darkness, and felt freeing. The white tunnel, however, felt like something that was coursing through my body. I felt floaty for a long time, like my body was a silvery liquid just existing in space. There were closed-eye visuals too, mostly random shapes and lines that I don’t remember.

I don’t remember much more.

I asked for more drugs. I said to Derrick, “The more the better,” and he said “Now that’s more like it.”

I don’t remember what happened after that. It doesn’t matter. Life isn’t linear. I probably stayed suspended in my wind and rain, drawn into some white tunnel. (You probably did.)

 

I had that book with me in the hotel: The ESP Enigma. I bought it when I was sixteen. It can’t just have been a coincidence, that I bought that book, part of me must have known even then. That I was a part of something larger than myself.

It’s scary now. I’m always scared I’m going to die. But I haven’t died yet. They told me at the hospital, what happens to mystical people?

Do they really die young? I don’t believe that. If I have some important calling, I’ll live longer because it will take me a long time to accomplish whatever it is I was meant to do. It’s not like I’m Jesus. And it’s not like doing drugs will kill me because I’m going to stick to the psychonaut way of doing drugs from now on.

 

(Write about the first time you smoked weed)

We sat by the river. I couldn’t get the lighter to work. Eventually I got some. I don’t have the words right now. (Because you don’t remember.)

You’re not trying hard enough.

(Write about what you did)

We walked. We ended up back at occupy. I went in my tent and almost fell asleep but Aiden found me and told me to not just sleep through it. We ended up walking around with John and asking people what they thought about occupy Pittsburgh. The group split up and Aiden and I were just walking around at night downtown, neither of us really knowing where we were going. He ended up looking for cigarettes to smoke behind some building. We ended up at a spontaneous protest. We stand with you, occupy Oakland!” The energy was beautiful. Healing energy. I don’t remember exactly what it is that happened in Oakland, California, that we were standing in solidarity with (because you were high. And it was a long time ago). Not that long ago.  But I remember the energy, and that it was beautiful, and that it gave me hope. (And that’s what counts).

We smoked more by a different river, looking over at the lights of southside. It might of been a different night. It was after Red lectured Aiden about wearing masks when protesting. We sat there looking out at the lights smoking weed. It might have been the same day, it might not have been. That’s not what matters. My story isn’t a linear one. What matters is that it happened. And that it was peaceful. And that even now, that it’s been a long time since I’ve smoked weed, I remember what it was like. Completely peaceful. One with every bone in my body. With the Earth, with the universe. I remember that those nights in the beginning of occupy Pittsburgh " the great tent city " was the beginning of waking up. It was utopia. We felt untouchable.

And I almost forgot about it. (Because it ended). They fed us. And it was easy. I kept saying we should have made a dumpster diving working group. (It happened a couple times. But mostly we relied on donations.)

(That was when I started really believing in anarchism. But I also stopped taking care of myself.)

There was the time when we smoked weed with Steinback in Southside. (Write about it later). We talked about train hopping as we walked to Southside. We got the weed and sat near the train tracks and smoked weed. We danced for awhile if I remember correctly, and then we ran across the train tracks. I ran right as the train was coming. Amy almost crossed and the train would have hit her. I stood with Steinback watching the train pass. He pointed to the part of the train I would sit on if I ever had the guts to try train hopping. Then Amy crossed and we all walked back to the tent city.

(But it was also when I started believing in myself.)

I’m at my mom’s house now, because I don’t trust myself enough. I got addicted to mental hospitals. I forgot. How could I forget that? I am a creature of love. And there is no love where I am now. But there is in Pittsburgh. How could I forget that? I’ll be fine, as long as there’s love. And I can create my own family, a new one that doesn’t treat my life like a game. That doesn’t constantly judge me. When I came to occupy I let it change me. It went into my blood and I let myself transform. And now I am at a new part of my life, a new transition, where I start to become a psychonaut. And maybe a Shamon, but I know I’m not there yet. I’m changing again, evolving with Victor. I can feel it with my heart. And when I’m trusting enough I know that we’re enough.

(It will take a long time.)

 

We stood by the creek. We’re not alone in this cold world anymore. Is it really a cold world? Love is the key. I chose to abandon my hatred family. It’s not a family if it’s always a game. There’s only hate here. My mom doesn’t know how to love, because she doesn’t love herself. (Teach her how.) But I’m the son. She should know how to not assume. To love unconditionally, and accept me for who I am, and not be embarrassed to be seen with me.

We’ll find love in each other.

We lay down by the creek in a grassy field. Listening to the water as it gently moves forward. The birds chirp in the distance. We’re so quiet, and so are they. Just there, listening to us, as we listen to them.

New beginnings don’t have to be so sad. This is like starting over. We’ll stick together. The birds are whispering. The wind is whispering. None of the melodrama matters anymore, we left it behind with the wind. I can abandon the hate that always stirs whenever I go back to Maryland. That raw anger that bursts through my blood and takes over my being, and makes it impossible for me to feel the love that I’m made of, that all creatures are made of.

What’s it like to be newly in love? It feels like we skipped that. It feels like I found my soul-mate. Like we’re bound beyond this lifetime, that we were meant to meet, that our destinies are intertwined. That we’re destined to be together. But I don’t trust myself often enough. I’ll learn eventually. To trust my instincts. To listen.

 

Everyone has that part of them. That darkness. It’s in there somewhere, in everyone.

It’s a beautiful dream.

Even my shadows are in love with you. But my shadows are receding. All of me is in love with all of you.

Dark and safe, light and dark collide. I was stuck in his head. Slowly I floated back. Floating, whirling in light.

Perhaps each planet is a subordinate universe. And the sun is God. Or the sun is the center. Where all energy emanates. And I said in that dream, everyone should be kissed by the sun. He had said, Zach's weird ideas are keeping me up.

 

 

There’s that moment when you finally realize that you’re a creature that’s connected to something. That you’re not alone, not in trapped in your own little dream world (but trapped all the same), that there are people before and after you. You wonder if your father forgot about his dreams, or if your mom made him forget, you wonder about that hatred in her blood, if it was her all along, that caused him to be so angry? (And you realize that your actions have impact on other people, and you’re a part of something much larger than yourself.)

(The part of you that remembers that he threw you, that remembers all the fights early morning getting in the car to go to school, throwing your brush at him, him hitting you, yelling at you. The part of you that remembers your parents always fighting " it was always two way. He broke my mom’s foot, she threw a chair at him, and they just couldn’t stop yelling, and it was always just so LOUD. They abused each other. It was vile, hatred, they were just two naturally peaceful people that when, put together, everything in the universe exploded with anger. They were two puzzle pieces that may have fit together once upon the time but along the time the cardboard ripped, got warn down, and they no longer fit together. Their blood boiled around each other and the worst in them stirred. And it was always like that, they were always fighting each other, she said he shoved her head in a toilet, well that’s old news they were always like that back when I lived with them.  And it makes me wonder what she did. She always seems to be able to hide from herself, to not realize that she’s the captain of her own boat. Never acknowledging her own faults, and always paranoid that every little thing he does is to hurt her. The psychological games she used to play with everyone she knows. But who knows, maybe she’s changing too.

There was something about that family that was so broken. It just…wasn’t really a family. When we tried to have game nights and fights broke out, mom would yell and call us the hatred family.  I never understood how so much hate could grow in someone’s heart. But hate begets hate. Love begets love begets courage, makes a person stronger. (Hearing, I’m gonna kill you, that isn’t strength, that’s weakness. I just want that part of us to go away, to LEAVE NOW AND NEVER COME BACK. In that way I guess we’re like Gollum, always chased by our shadows, our darker histories. My bad family.)  Being here, in Maryland, it’s not good for me, I can tell.  Then come back, he says. I want to. I’m still a little bit afraid but my love for him makes me feel stronger. Internally. Because I know he doesn’t really want to hurt me, that he loves me like I love him, and that we were destined to be together, maybe even beyond this lifetime. The hope that maybe I found my soul mate. I never thought that could actually happen to me.

But as connected as I am to this family, it’s my turn to have a legacy. To follow my own dreams, to make my own marks. So I’ll choose to leave it behind with the wind, and the wind will whisper as I wonder softly sometimes if a second set of footsteps follow " if God’s silently listening, watching over me. If I have guardian angels. If spirits are protecting me.  It’s my turn to wonder what it all means, my turn to be a hippie (and I do wonder " was my dad a hippie? Was he a psychonaut? He did drop acid. But he turned his back on that world). I can’t remind my parents of who they were before they met each other, as much as I wish I could. It’s not my job. (But you want to.) (Dropping acid doesn’t make someone a psychonaut). But thinking about it does.

I’m not alone in it all anymore. Maybe I don’t know what it all means, but I’m not alone. Maybe I am at that same turning point my mom was when she fell in love with my dad, but this won’t be like that.  ‘That’s what you’re afraid of, isn’t it?’ he asks. ‘Yes. But it won’t be.’ Because love is stronger than hate, and we can be the change we wish to see in the world. When he asked Aiden that, if love is really stronger than hate, Aiden said, ‘Do you even have to ask?’

            And I know the same thing deep in my own heart. Love is present, guiding the two of us, as long as we remember it’s there " nurture the love instead of feeding the hate. Is there really even any hate, or is it just hate? Our bark is worse than our bite. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ he says. That it’s just our misconceptions, our nightmares, our shadows. And after all can’t we tame that darkness (I’m afraid. Me too, he says.), change it, turn it into love and light? Yin and yang, right? Find the right balance. Do all of our parts exist, are we the sum of our parts? Or something else entirely? A destiny we’ve yet to stumble upon.

            Trust yourself, but trust your doubts too, because doubting is an instinct just like any other.  You have to learn to think critically about it all, and pick and choose which instinct to believe. We can find a way to be harmonious with each other. I was just afraid. ‘You don’t think I was?’ he said. He’s just better at hiding his fear. This thing, this mind reading thing, its new and strange and beautiful and terrifying, all at the same time. I really hope we can’t kill each other telepathically. Now we can’t, because it’s written down (I hope that stops us. I hope our love for each us stop us. ‘So do I,’ he says.) ‘Stop being so afraid,’ he said. I was going to write ‘stop being so damn afraid’. He said don’t swear. And now I understand why: he can hear my voice in his head. I didn’t think about that before. So now I’m trying to stop swearing so much.

 

            “Zack, look,” The little girl, Kayla, said. She thought I was twelve. She was blowing bubbles, and I was trying to control them telekinetically. Sometimes it felt like it was almost working, or maybe it was just the way the bubbles were. “Look behind you,” she said when I was running, chasing after bubbles. There were many bubbles behind me. The other day on the swingset she kept saying, “Derrick!” and I laughed because I know someone named Fluffy. Was that just a coincidence, that she kept saying, “Derrick!”? It could have been. Exactly. So stop being so afraid. ‘Just remember to look behind you,’ he said.

            I wonder sometimes if she was a spirit manifested as a little girl. The bubble wand wacked me accidentally, and I wonder if that was a message to be careful. It scared me, playing with her. Maybe it was just a delusion, though. “Zack, look.”

            First we were popping the bubbles but then I started trying to catch them. Kayla was teaching me how to be gentle with them. Was coming to Maryland part of my fate, was I meant to meet Kayla, so I could learn?

            At the least she taught me how to be less afraid. She said she’d jump off her swing if I did too, and she did, so I did, and I landed on one foot. She’s teaching me how to have fun again. I think we all forget about that sometimes, that it’s okay to have fun. And now I’m feeling a little bit afraid. ‘So stop writing about it,’ he says. I think I’ll listen to him.

 

            I feel like I’m nothing sometimes. But sometimes I think about that night? Was it night? It was for us because I was trying to sleep. That night I asked him to never give up on me.

 

 

You can’t just do acid and then live like a normal person. It changes you. It gets under your skin and it changes the way your brain works. But it’s not just your brain, it’s your spirit, the spirit of who you are. Sometimes you trip and sometimes you turn into a telepath. That’s what five hits of acid did for me. I put the first three under my tongue and then smoked some weed and focused on sending the weed to Victor as I exhaled. Did I unconsciously intend to open up my brain to his? Did our brainwaves connect that night?

But it’s not just that.  There’s more to it. You wonder what it all means, and it gets under your skin and you realize not that you’re not a normal person anymore, but that you never were. And when it comes down to it, who would want to be normal? Then you wonder what it is you’re supposed to do with so much time. What it all means, what is this void? Is love all there is? Sometimes all I want to do is spend my life with Victor. It will be a great adventure.

That night I dropped five hits of acid with Jake. We sat by the river and smoked weed and talked about telepathy and the planets above us. He pointed up at the stars and talked about a planet that was closer than it usually is. We sat there for a while. I kept the acid in my mouth even as I smoked weed. Then we walked to the streets of Southside where a bunch of people were sitting down laughing and making music. There was a sign that said, keep your kids in science class, it will save the planet. I asked Jake if it actually said that or if I was just tripping. Unfortunately it actually said it, and I wasn’t really tripping at all. My mind felt a bit strange but that was all. Jake said, you’re in science class right now, and I agreed with him.

He played his violin and then let me play it. I don’t have the words to explain the beauty of people making music just for the sake of it, people daring to live on their own outside of the system. We were busking, with a sign that said “Happiness one dollar”. There was more to the sign, something profound, but I don’t remember. I don’t remember. I do remember walking home; crossing the bridge from Southside to Oakland by foot in the middle of the night, probably early morning or close to it, not a soul awake. I stopped to sit by some trees for awhile, maybe ten minutes, and then walked the rest of the way back to my apartment. I stayed up, my mind strange but not really tripping at all. I don’t remember what I was thinking about but I was probably thinking about Victor.

But that’s not when it started. It started under that bridge on New Years, when it was dark. It was the beginning of a new world. Fast forward a bit to that day that fate had me run into Victor and Derrick after eating a meal at Wellsprings. We hung out. We went to the same bridge Victor and I smoked the synthetic cannibinoids under on New Year’s. We smoked weed there and I tried nitrous for the first time. Eventually we ended up railing adderall at Wizard’s Place. Time seemed to change " we stayed up all night and I did some writing, I lost what it is that I wrote.  It had something to do with the fact that I was born in the wrong body, but not the wrong gender, the wrong species. Maybe it was just the drugs or maybe I’m not human.  My body hurt from staying up, and probably from the drugs. I heard a voice in my head, ‘You could’ve pushed it’, after I railed three quarters of my last line of adderall.  There was going to be a protest soon and Victor told me that he’d never leave the room if I didn’t, so I went downstairs and waited for him.

We went outside, breathing in the fresh air. We broke out into a run, it felt good to use my muscles. Victor told me that when on amphetamines the muscles work twice as fast, so it felt good to be running.

(Run forward, be peaceful. People changed. The acid got under my skin and changed me. But that night changed me too. I stayed up four days. I got on a bus and people were chanting, Stand up fight back! And I chanted Stand up Smoke Weed! Hannon said, you’re an idiot. I said, I know I’m an idiot, and then said, I was joking I was obviously joking to try to take it back. Later when all of us were walking around in a museum I heard, It’s a sign. And I hoped it was a sign of something, a sign of the revolution, a sign of something. Something about the Earth, about the world, is changing. I can feel it in my blood. Its 2012. Humans are changing, evolving, the way Victor and I are evolving together. And we have a destiny. We’re part of it. Isn’t that a glorious thing? Humans are finally waking up from their silent slumber.)

 I’m scared because Victor’s not here. Together, we’ll be alright. Twenty more days until my dad can drive me back to Pittsburgh. ‘Think we’ll make it that long?’ he asks. ‘We have no choice. So we will,’ I say. Right now I’m sitting down thinking about living for the present moment. What is the present moment, and can I accept it? ‘We still have a long way to go.’ He says. I’ll write it as we go. Exactly, he says. So don’t worry about it. We’ll figure it out together.

And that’s the beauty of it. The not knowing. We can just be, somehow in it, connected to the earth, connected to the universe and all her secrets, together. We can search for those secrets together. We can help each other stay alive. ‘Think we’ll make it past 2012?’ he asks. ‘I hope so,’ I say. ‘We will,’ he says. I want to cast a circle but not by myself, not without Victor by my side. Because we’re bound together somehow. We can read each other’s minds. And something huge like that, we should do together if we do it at all, because it will affect both of us. So I’ll wait.

 

I remember when I first started listening to Johnny Hobo, and when I first started dumpster diving. When I first met Eva, the night we took a bus to a concert near Polish Hills and we couldn’t get in because she was underage.  We walked all the way back, stopped at my apartment, and then walked all the way to Shadyside and East Liberty and dumpstered pizza. It was the first time I really went dumpster diving. It was the night I started believing in anarchism. It was a long walk, the two of us alone and free to do whatever we wanted.

 

The hotel " how do I even begin to write about the hotel? Beats me. Lenny’s parents paid for it. But for us, it was free. I have broken memories. Lenny called me and told me to come over to the hotel and hang out, and I ended up staying there for three days. We watched television and did drugs. We stole extra hot chocolate from the kitchen area downstairs, and went dumpster diving. I went dumpster diving anyways. I brought back bread with holes in it and tomatoes and boxes of cereal. Somehow I’ll piece it all together. I was just…off in a different world.

Loren said, It must be a sense…to have 3 telepaths so close to one another. He said, it almost appears as though there’s an underlying instinct present to form a communal bond. What are we running from? Stop running. Run. Whatever you do be yourself. Just be yourself, and let the others be themselves, and then you have harmony. Don’t be scared, we’ll be fine.

Loren said, I feel very good right now. that last part of the conversation. i feel... as though I’ve fulfilled some latent obligation inside myself.if that makes sense. by helping you. I said, it does make sense, I like it. We feel goodright now too.

I revere all life. Even bugs. Learn how to compromise.

Three: the fact that it’s three helps us. There’s more room to disagree and still accept each other.

My mind had caught a bug. I kept thinking or hearing “I’m gonna kill you.” It wasn’t real. It wasn’t me, it was just my paranoia, my fear of being a telepath.

Suddenly we could see each other, too. We could blink with our third eye (using our forehead) and see what the other two people looked like at the time. It was scary. Victor said “Think about Aiden” to get me to be able to stop looking, and I did, and ended up seeing Aiden, and waking him up. Suddenly he could hear my thoughts as well. I didn’t know it was possible for me to call out to other people. It had happened to me before, in one of the mental hospitals, I had called out to Tara and Kelton and Verra and a bunch of other people but I assumed it wasn’t real. Turns out, it was. I ended up talking with Tara in my head. She said, “Come back to capoeira, Zach.” I talked with Verra, ended up confessing that I used to be in love with her, but that now I’m in love with Victor. I threatened all these people because part of me wanted to die and wanted them to kill me, even though I didn’t really want to die. I ended up talking with my mom and dad, and found out that they are anarchists. My dad tried to kill me because he had to go to work but, luckily, he didn’t know how, and didn’t succeed. That was scary, though. My life was in danger because I was a telepath out of control that couldn’t sleep. Eventually the hospital I was in gave me risperedol " unfortunally no sleeping meds yet " and I got sleep. The people I was talking with fell back asleep and fortunately can no longer hear my thoughts.

We’ll have more stories to tell.

            I don’t know how to stop talking to people in my head. Someone said, don’t. I don’t know who it is but I’m afraid. I’m afraid I’ll be stuck being a telepath my whole life. It’s real. And it’s scary. With telepathy you have to be honest and I’m the keeper of secrets I can’t tell. I’m in love with Victor, and I want him to be a free man, and I want to go to Florida with him. I need to adjust to being a telepath. Don’t think about the things you don’t want people to know, because you never know who will hear your thoughts. Lock the secrets up in a box and send that box to the moon.  I’m going to forget. But I won’t forget about Victor.

People. They’re just there, in my head. Floating. Just there, listening to me think. Sometimes responding. I don’t know why or how I’m doing this. I just see them in my head, and my forehead blinks, and then, there they are. There they are, in my head.

 

I sat in the small apartment building watching two cats dance. Their paws entangled with each other. Outside, a storm was brewing. The bright yellow sun hid behind the clouds.  There was nothing to do.  Locked out of my apartment, I was trapped in this one.  I couldn’t go outside. I remembered what he said that day when we ran to do drugs in Derrick’s tent. There’s always time to stop and smell the roses. I remember him now. He’s not the same person he used to be. Or, I just didn’t know him well enough.  Now I do, and I still love him.

There was the running dream. I was running and jumping over live obstacle courses, rocks, benches. Then I found myself inside a store. I woke and heard someone talking to me in my head, telling me about the first time they stole, and how they told him he was evil, and I thought it was him, but it wasn’t. Was it my soul? I met my soul a week ago.  They told me I was a young soul reincarnated once, that I lived to be old in a past life.

I can’t ask Kelton whether or not he’s a psychonaut. He’s just someone I know. And I project. Just because he’s dropped acid and studies philosophy doesn’t make him a psychonaut. He says that everything becomes less true over time. I agree with him. I want to get to know him better but I think he’s gone. What if he’s a telepath too? I can’t get to know telepaths because I have secrets now and I can’t help but think of them.

If I live I'm writing a book and getting it published,. There will be more experiences to write about, and I will put all of my trip reports in my book, especially if I get to experience ayahuasca and mescaline and I might drop acid again but alone so no one can read my mind except for him.

We have mountains to climb, and trees to listen to. We have dreams to dream, and destinies that will unfold together, seed a thought and you harvest a destiny, and that’s beautiful, dreams that may have been real and may have been an illusion, but if you spend all your time dreaming, you'll do great things. We have forests to visit, and we'll listen to their songs, drink in their music, feel their spirit, feel all the energy burst. And this is you and I, dreaming together, everything unfolding like a dream. Life is but a dream. So dream on and explore. Find me in your dreams. And we will, if I live, except not as lovers like I thought it would be, but as friends. If I die, we will meet again, and this will never get published, unless I send it to Peter.

 

The best possible thing you can do with your life is be as strange as you can possibly be, all the while doing whatever you feel like doing, whenever you feel like doing, and nothing anyone says will matter. and nothing is embarassing if you're confident. And to be weird is a way of life. And that there is nothing stopping you.

 The way the wind shuffles when it's dark outside.  When faeries and goblins march the street hand in hand, unarmed.  And that the world is the lightest when it's dark outside.  And I don't give a damn what you think.

 This is the rain.  Not rain but pale hands clinging to telescopes.  When it is raining.  No, when it is raining cats and dogs.  As if cats are any less than dogs because they are cats.  And no one thinks female cats are any different than male cats. 

 The best possible thing you can do with your life is be happy.  Happy with the way barbed wire juts out of the Universe's skeleton.  Is it the Earth's skeleton? But it is just an illusion.  but the Earth's skin is just a volcano. and nothing is embarassing.  and that monkeys don't get embarassed.

 And that nothing is stopping you.  You pummel through.  There is no logic to the rhythm.  the fall of the tyrany.  what was it like when the dinasours were alive? that they could never communicate "gender".

 the relentless rhythm.  creeping and stalking is just a word for obsession. relentless love in the form of pealed oranges on the side of the road.  No one eats the banana peals.

 but nothing is stopping you.  but nothing is stopping you.  but nothing is stopping you.  so why are you sitting still in your cage?

Here we are. In love. What else is there? But love is enough. I am listening to hear where you are. Love is beautiful. Love is the key. Maybe love is all there is. But that’s enough. We can have adventure too. Becoming a shamon will be an adventure. Love is stronger than hate.  Do you really have to ask? Not really. I know it with all my heart. (When I’m trusting myself I know)

.

It’s all that inspires me nowadays

That’s a poem.

 

It’s all music, stuck in my head.

 

“I’m not there,” he said in my head.

 

Words kept pouring out and I couldn’t stop them. But writing about it helps.

 

The world keeps spinning as we lie here.

Take it one day at a time

I have to stay here in Pittsburgh, somehow

You can’t ever capture the moment

 

Evanescence how can you see/wake me up lyrics fits

It all fits

A perfect circle

My whole life

 

We’re not back to square one

He had long dark hair. He looked like an elf. There was a link. Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt, except we were afraid we would accidentally kill each other, well that was mostly my fear, because he could read my mind and it had been a long time since we had actually hung out in person, and our entire relationship was the words he said to me inside my head. As beautiful as that was, it wasn’t enough. We never saw each other. I had run away, back to my mom’s house, because I was scared, and crazy.

The beach. Or in the middle of the words. Any way there’d have to be water nearby, because I love water, swimming in it, looking at it, feeling it. There’d have to be trees, and lots of life, and lots of people. Maybe a little bit hidden, but not completely hidden, because I rely too much on hospitals because I’m scared of death and there’s literally something different about my brain. An mri scan said so. At least its not a tumor. No mass effect, the doctor said.

I don’t even remember what it feels like to be high. It’s been too long. And I’m a telepath, sort of. Well, someone can read my mind.

One day something broke. I had a dream, and then I woke up. And then I fell back asleep. I dreampt of a boy with long black hair. It’s not a dream, he said.

I can’t make up stories anymore, because this is all I think about. Who would be any different? Who could experience telepathy and not think about it all the time? It’s all I think about. Then there’s weed, which could save the world. I miss it. It would help me write.

I feel like dreaming.

A boy sat down on some rocks. He stared out at the water. He had a dog. He played with his dog.

Just hold onto the sentiment. Of love. Hold it all in your being and sing it, sing it loud and proud.

We were a spirit tribe. Me, Derrick, Victor, and Aiden. It was a dream, it wasn't real. It was all in my  head.  We will meet again. We are connected beyond death. And it was a beautiful thing to think. I found my spirit tribe but it wasn't real. Or maybe it was. And if it wasn't, at least I knew what it felt like to be connected to people spiritually, beyond death. It was beautiful, even though it probably wasn't real, and maybe it was a vision or a prediction of the future. It was beautiful. I was home in my heart, and now that its over, I miss the real people that were in that vision especially since one of them isn't even in Pittsburgh anymore.

That night, dancing wildly as if possessed by spirits. Our spirits were connected, and we were all linked beyond death. There was something in the air that night, something that God sent. Ze sent us all to connect with each other, and if that was our only purpose, then that was enough. I believe that in some way we helped each other. I remembered what I learned in a past life: what it was like to have friends that care, friends that lose their inhibition with each other and listen carefully. We were a spirit tribe, spirits whose destinies intertwined. We will meet again. Spirits whose paths were set to met, set out from the start to help each other. It was written in the stars, written in our plans when we died the last time, died and came back as new people, and here we were again, dancing.

Author's Note

this is incomplete, I am posting it incase I die