"WOULD YOU LIKE SOME LZD?" is a message I received from E15 one evening, a few weeks after the event of the last article. Of course I said yes. It felt like my wish to try all the different substances was coming true, and I didn't even have to go out looking for them. I wasn't going to do it alone, so I messaged16 my friend R, and she agreed to do it with me. We got two tabs. I spent a lot of time "preparing" for this trip. Watching videos, and reading about LSD. The most important takeaway I got was "set and setting". I don't think I really understood what that meant at the time, but it was still good to keep in mind. R had done LSD once at the time, but I think this was the first time where I did not feel like I was less prepared than the person doing the drugs with me. From the beginning it felt like the two of us were going into something unknown together.
We needed a place. I found a very cheap one room apartment we could rent for just 15€. The address was G[street] st. 5117. Then there was the question of what to tell our parents, and we did the classic, where I told mine that I am going to sleep over at her place, and she told hers that she'll be sleeping over at mine18.
I get the keys from the owner, and arrive at the place a good couple of hours before she does. One room, pretty much the whole area is taken up by a double bed. A tiny fridge with a microwave on top of it to its side. A wall unit against the wall opposite to the bed with a super old and tiny CRT TV. No kitchen, just a door to a surprisingly modern looking bathroom with a huge mirror above the sink. I go to the store, buy us some snacks and stuff, come back and spend some time settling in19. As that was happening, my girlfriend20 kinda broke up with me over text. It was weird, and not final, but I think it's an important part of the whole "set and setting" that was building before me.
R arrived at the apartment. We didn't waste much time, and took the tabs. There was going to be about an hour before they started working. She also brought some paper and pens to write/draw with, which was a really good idea21. We were both nervous, we really didn't know what was going to happen. One of us took a piece of paper and wrote down the address on it. G[street] st. 51. We agreed that we would text it to one of our friends if things were going bad22, and we needed saving. That writing was meant to be a sort of truth left behind by our sober selves. R went to the bathroom. For some reason, I thought it would be funny to "hide" behind the window curtain while I waited for her. I wasn't really hidden, as there wasn't much room between it and the window, it was like putting a lampshade over your head, and pretending no one can see you.
15No "Hello", no nothing. Like I said, E was a weird dude.
16More likely I was already texting with her at the time. We were really close at the time, and would often spend the evenings just texting about life. I would have easily called her my best friend at the time, and I think this is important to mention.
17I never thought about it before, but it's funny how close that is to the hotel where I took my first ecstasy pill. Actually, all my later dealers used to live in that same part of town.
18I say "classic", but that's the only time in my life where I actually did that. It just kinda seems like a thing they do in teen movies or something.
19I think getting more familiar with the place really helped me with the things to come. I'm a little sad she didn't get to do that, but I did send her pictures and videos of the place. I even pooped in the bathroom there, haha.
20I'm really not sure if I can call her that, it was an on and off thing, that lasted a very short time. It's the same girl from the weed story.
21I still have the piece of paper I drew on that day... somewhere.
22We specifically named it "being fucked".
R exits the bathroom. She sees me, and we both begin laughing hysterically. My joke was not that funny, and I'm not even sure if it's the reason I am laughing. My lungs feel weird. The feeling is almost certainly related to the laughing, but it's nothing like the feeling I usually get from it. It's a bit uncomfortable. I come back from behind the curtain. Everything looks weird. The room is the same, nothing's changed. I can clearly recognize my friend. But something is still a bit off, I just can't put my mind to it. I'm not sure how long it took, before the "oh shit, it kicked in" thought crossed my mind, but it wasn't all that long. In fact, it might have happened while I was still by the window. Funny, I kinda felt a similar surprise I did with MDMA again - the feeling was different. I thought that by this point, I had understood that it will feel different, yet for some reason, a part of me was still surprised.
I had a small orange Bluetooth speaker with me, I had connected to my phone, and hung it on the wall unit. There was music playing, pretty much the entire time, although I don't think I remember a single song we listened to. I'm not sure what we did for the next hour. It felt like we were two people, who did not quite understand what they signed up for, exploring this weird place. Or not a place - a state of being. For the most part, it did feel like we were in it together, which was nice. We trusted each other a lot, and that made it all seem somehow safer. Although R was getting a lot more quiet than she usually is.
The colors were intense. The walls were melting, and breathing. It felt like they were breathing at me. Various objects lost their shape, and started bleeding color. The wall unit looked like its perspective got messed up. Nothing around me felt stable. And it all felt weirdly claustrophobic. I came up with a genius solution to the claustrophobia we both felt - I Googled "big rooms", and we just both looked at the image results for a while. I was expecting that to make us feel like we were in those rooms, which it certainly did not. But it did help, just as a distraction from everything. An activity. Using my phone was weird.
I was on the other side of the room, maybe on the floor. R was on the corner of the bed. She said something about how intense the trip was
But we're not fucked, are we?Panic. Up until that moment, I thought we were having a good time. Turns out we weren't, we were "fucked". We spent a good amount of time just staring at the paper. G[street] st. 51. We kept repeating that address out loud. G[street] st. 51. Almost like doing that will somehow make it all make sense again.
(Disconnected). It's my Bluetooth speaker. It started acting up for some reason, and disconnecting from my phone. When it did, the music would stop, and a Chinese lady helpfully informed us by loudly saying "disconnected". This kept happening for the rest of the night. With all the things happening, all the ways in which this experience was already weird, we now had a voice repeating "disconnected".
Time. How much time had gone by? What time was it? These questions were impossible to answer. For all I knew, it could have been weeks of us sitting in that apartment. When will this end? Will it ever? I don't think so. I don't think I will ever be the same1.
We video called a friend3. He truly had more experience than us with this sort of thing. I remember he was walking outside somewhere, and I could see that it was night behind him. We voiced all of our most concerning questions to him, and he tried his best to calm us down.
I don't think I will ever come back from this.I did not believe it. (Disconnected). It's weird, I did not think that I would spend the rest of my life like this, with the breathing walls and melting colors, but I somehow knew that things would not be the same again1.
We spent a lot of time with our papers, just drawing, and writing. They weren't really any coherent thoughts, more phrases that somehow seemed to capture the thing we were in. One particular phrase I wrote down many times on my paper was (disconnected) "I'm tripping balls man". Accompanied by drawing of balls, of course. Another thing I spent a lot of time on was trying to visually represent the difference between MDMA and LSD. It was just two labeled circles, the LSD one being much, much bigger.
R had gone almost completely silent. (Disconnected). She understood something. Something deep about life and the meaning of it, but no matter how hard she tried, she could not explain it. Neither in words, nor on the paper. It was something about Adam and Eve. She drew them on her paper.
The carpet. At some point, I noticed that besides the bed, there was a small, worn down4 rug. It had a nice colorful mandala-like image on it. I noticed how beautiful its colors are. And how the mandala seems to dance when I look at it. I was mesmerized by it. I pointed it out to R, and we must have spent like an hour (disconnected) just staring at it. Oh, the beauty5.
I also understood something: I don't care. Let me explain. At the time, I used to paint my nails, but I was afraid of what people might think, afraid of being made fun of at school, etc. And suddenly, there was this clear realization that none of that matters. I grabbed the nail polish I had in my backpack, and painted all ten of my fingernails right then and there6.
Finally, we decided to go on a walk. Yes, outside. It must have been around 3:30 at night by then. We dressed up in our winter clothes, and went out. It was freezing cold, and black dark, apart from the old yellow streetlights. We only really went around the apartment building we were in, but it felt like a real journey. We were still two explorers in a place we did not quite understand. There was no one else around, except the two of us. And then, I see a woman. And two kids. Just playing outside in the snow. A woman and two kids? At this time of night? I'm tripping balls, man. But as our path led right next to where they were standing, and we kept getting closer, R asks me, if I see them too. Wait, so it's not a hallucination?
Once we got back, we started getting ready to go to sleep. I smoked a joint. It was not a good idea, and certainly not one R approved of. I don't know why I did that. I don't even know exactly why I remember it being a bad idea, but I do. (Disconnected). Oh shit, that scared me. There wasn't even any music playing, but I left the speaker on, and it did it's thing again. Okay, speaker off, time to go to sleep.
1In a weird way, I think I was right. I was never the same after that night. It's hard to describe, it's not like "oh, I took psychedelics once and now I am a completely different person. I'm going to shave my head and move to the mountains" kind of thing. No, it's much more subtle than that. But there is something about seeing how a tiny, tiny2 amount of some substance can make you question things that you were certain about for your entire life. The flow of time. The stability of objects around you. The size of the room you're in. Who your friend is. Who you are. Where does one end, and the other begin... What even is reality? Just the knowledge that it's possible is something that makes me see everything differently. Question things, even if they seem ordinary. I think that's what stuck with me, and never went away.
2I really want to emphasize this point. Usually, weed is sold by grams. MDMA - milligrams. LSD - micrograms. That's 1000th of a milligram, or 1000000th of a gram. It's an absolutely microscopic amount. And yet, it is somehow enough to do all that?
3It was E's twin brother. I met him the same day I met E, just a little later. I'm not sure how R knew him, but she did.
4I only found out it was old and worn down and almost gray when I got to look at it sober again. It did not seem that way at all at the time.
5I was so in love with the rug, I took a picture of it, edited it to look as close to what it looked like to me then as I could, and kept it as my phone's lock screen for a long time. I would look at it on my future trips, and it was just as beautiful, and moved just as much, if not more, than the day I first saw it.
6And then quickly learned just how hilariously bad of an idea it is to do that while you're tripping. I forgot I did that, almost immediately, and ruined them by brushing against something. But it didn't really matter, the symbolic declaration was the important part.
Morning. It's still weird. We didn't spend any more time in that apartment - we cleaned the mess we made7 earlier, and left. We had one last look at the huge "G[street] st. 51" that was written on the side of the building, and made our way to the bus stop.
So many people around, going about their day. How are they just so calm? After what had just happened. Oh. Right, they don't know. None of them know, and likely never will. Reality. We're sitting there, still freezing cold, waiting for our bus. It's hard to get to grips with it all. My mind just can't. I am sober by now, right? I think I am, but I don't feel like I did before any of this. Is this what I meant when I said that I will never be the same again? Will I feel like this forever?8
Me and R go our separate ways. Home. I couldn't stay home for long, I had to go out for a walk, no matter how cold, or how tired I was. What do I do with all of... this? I remember texting with K on my walk, she'd done acid before, and seemed to understand what I was trying to say, no matter how incoherent it was.
I've done acid quite a few times after that again, but none of the trips were like this one. Even the visuals were never quite the same as they were on this first time. I don't know why. There's always the possibility, that this wasn't even LSD, as there are a lot of analogues that act similar, but not quite the same, and there is no real way to tell, besides getting a testing kit, which I never did. Also, it could have just been the fact that it was my first time. Or the particular set and setting. Who knows.
Another thing that stayed with me after this trip, were all the inside jokes. The "(disconnected)", the G[street] st. 519, the "five minutes before disaster"10, and the promise. The promise was, that if I were to ever do shrooms, my first time would be with R as well. I've never done shrooms11.
7I didn't even mention how we ate the snacks I bought. I only have one image left in my mind: R is laying on the floor, I am sitting on the edge of the bed above her, and I am throwing popcorn at her face. She does catch some in her mouth. Some. Yeah, there was a mess to clean up after.
8Nope. Not really. I mean yeah, the experience did stay with me, and it did change me, but the things I felt the morning after did go away. I came to the conclusion later that the effects of acid last about 24h. Not all of them are the "trip", the peak lasts only about 5h total, but there is a specific feeling, even the day after. It might just be tiredness. It does feel like you somehow managed to live an entire week's worth of experiences in just a few hours.
9Me and R used to send each other pics of that giant writing on the side of the building that said G[street] st. 51 each time either of us passed it on a bus, or on foot, for a long time after this.
10I'm not sure when exactly this came to be, but it's a phrase we used to refer to the moment just before acid hit us. The unknowing of what's about to happen to you, and the hindsight of how naive the past looks, once you do.
11I've had many opportunities to, even held shrooms in my hand, but I kept my word. I'm not sure if it's ever going to happen, given neither of us do drugs anymore, but still.