FEATURE | DRUGS
Written & illustrated by Tashi Donnelly (she/her) | @tashi_rd | Feature Editor
It was the 5th of January 2020. My boyfriend and I arrived home to our muggy Grey Lynn flat. We’d been trudging our way through some family event, we hadn’t told anyone we were in the midst of an ongoing conversation about whether or not to break up. Our relationship had been rocky for a while. The discussion led us to the sombre conclusion that we should end our relationship. In our infinite wisdom, we decided to take acid together and watch Bojack Horseman, a sort of ‘last hurrah’ to what had been a pretty fun 1 ½ years.
Drying our tears and blowing our noses, we got the acid out and he instructed me on how to take it. I’d never done acid before, and throughout our relationship, he’d introduced me to quite a few recreational drugs in a way that made me feel safe. He patiently answered all my anxious questions.
“Will it make me feel nauseous?”
“Very unlikely.”
“Could it make me shit or piss myself?”
“No.”
“Is there any, even small chance that it could cause instant death?”
“No, but if you took an absolutely insane amount, you might fry your brain.”
“And how much are we taking?”
“One tab, which is not that much, you’d have to take the whole sheet to get close to the danger zone, and even then you wouldn’t die.”
Waiting for it to kick in, we passed the time watching BoJack get up to his shenanigans and intermittently pausing to burst into tears. Just as the walls started melting, I looked at our bay window, our curtains closed to keep the glare of summer sun off our TV screen. I noticed an unusual orange glow. I looked around our bedroom and sure enough, it looked like a photo from the 1860s, distinctly sepia and off-kilter.
“Does the room look… orange to you?” I asked my now ex-boyfriend.
He looked around, “What the fuck?”
We hurried to the window and drew back the manky flat curtains to a sight most commonly found in American movies when there’s a scene set in Mexico. The colour graders had fucked up in the editing room and forgot we were in New Zealand.
Someone had dropped a 30% opacity orange filter over Tāmaki Makaurau.
It wasn’t just the sky that was orange. Everything was orange.
Being of a rational mind, I immediately assumed the most likely of causes:
An atomic bomb
A planet-destroying comet
A solar flare so large it was about to kill us all
But the funny thing about being under the influence of a potent psychedelic drug is that it alters your thoughts, emotions, and sensory perceptions. So, at that moment, while my anxious brain conjured all the worst-case scenarios for me to have a panic attack about, I felt uncommonly calm. My internal monologue sounded something like this:
Death has become a friend. My inevitable expiration feels harmonious with the cosmos. Everything that is must end, everything returns to a state of not-being. I can not fear death while alive because I am not dead, and I can not fear it while dead because I am it. Death is just the return to the state of non-existence, which I experienced before I was born. All we humans do on this mortal plane is create cultural and religious systems to manage the anxiety and fear of death. To live authentically, one must come to terms with death, to feel the despair and accept it as a natural element to living. The dead cannot mourn life, only the living can mourn the dead.
I gazed into the fiery expanse of the orange clouds and surrendered calmly to the inevitability of death.
“Oh man, the smoke from the Australian bushfires has travelled over the Tasman, turning the sky orange around Auckland,” My ex-boyfriend said, looking at his phone.
Overcome with relief, I replied, “I don’t want to break up.”
Comments