Salvia Divinorum Memoir [Final Draft]

It’s an early spring day. I’m walking along the beach with three of my best friends. There’s a wind coming up over the sand and the waves creeping up the shore slowly trickle back toward the ocean. There is a sense of promise in the morning that I can feel in my chest, and it radiates around us. Light permeates the air, and the vast blue sky is speckled with a few tufts of bright, white clouds. I lift my head to watch Ed and Jenny begin climbing a small hill toward an embankment of trees, and I can’t hide my smile. Cote and I trudge behind them, lifting our knees high as we begin the final stretch of our trek into the woods.
There’s a slight anxiety that I linger over for just a moment. I know the risks and had done some research online, but I had never tried drugs before. For all of my yearning to be creative and think outside the box I was so sure my boundless curiosity about the inner-workings of the universe would somehow be quenched, and insight revealed to me, by inhaling the burning embers of this plant, Salvia Divinorum. It was legal, and the hallucinogenic state it created would only last ten minutes. I was positive that I wanted to explore this experience and to see the world from a perspective unlike anything else I had consciously perceived or imagined.
I am fifteen years old. Cote and I are stepping over thorns and branches up a mound of rock, earth and moss to a little clearing in the middle of some trees just beginning to bud. We’re safely out of view, in a private clearing in the woods. I look to my friends and their presence is encouraging. I’m ready to begin my journey. I’m the first to try.
Ed hands me a pipe and after a few seconds of instruction I hold it to my lips and light the bowl. The smell is remarkable, and similar to burning leaves. The taste is so bitter. I hold in the smoke and look to Ed as I exhale, frowning. “I don’t feel any different.” Ed leans over and lights the bowl for me, “Now hold it in as long as you can.” But already I feel something tugging on the back of my flannel.
There’s a deafening strike of humility that trembles down my spine. I stretch out my legs on the ground as I’m pulled further and further away from my friends. Everything feels like it’s folding unto itself. “I’m so sorry.” I moan. Drool is dripping from my lips, but I don’t notice because all I can remember is the expanse between my friends. We are so far away from each other. I try to stand and fall. I have no motor skills.
For a moment I’m against a tree, with eyes patterned up and down its trunk. They look at me expectantly and with distrust, like I’m an intruder to this place. I look down my body which has begun to merge with the tree in some dissociative frenzy. I watch as my feet, legs, and stomach are pulled apart, and I flail to collect my disembodied limbs. Grasping for the back of my head and neck all I can think about is how my entire being is contained in my mind and I don’t want to lose it. My memories and capability of speech are long gone. I am convinced I am dying, or more likely, I have already died and am now passing through reality to an underworld or overworld.
Mental cognition itself has become like staring into the sun, blinding and futile. I am overwhelmed and powerless to the might of a chaotic entity that exists far beyond the mortal plights I once recognized. Nothing feels safe, and everything I witness has an identity of its’ own that is sacred and improper to move. I have lost my family and friends, and all the splendors and achievements of mankind. I have moved on and am returning to the womb of a recycling and conscious Earth.
Jenny rolls into view. There seem to be an endless array of her, dropping off beyond the horizon, and as she raises her arm to touch my shoulder I see her movement in two dimensional frames starting from the end, and collapsing backward toward the beginning, until suddenly her arm is where I knew it would be. I pull away so she doesn’t get wrapped away with me. She has a smile on her face but there is a concern in her eyes that I feel awful and responsible for. I hope nobody else has to experience something akin to this.

Tugging backward, I fall down a hill through several pricker bushes. I’m not cognizant of this. Internally, I am struggling to find justification for this barbaric endgame. Knowledge is dead. My body is being tucked back into the ground. With what little mental reasoning I have I fumble to make amends in hopes I can bargain a return to life. I am so sure everything is connected and if I could just prove myself worthy, I’d be allowed back.
The ground is littered with faces. I know they are leaves but I also know they are deceased human faces. They are the ancestors of our species stretching all around me, long since moved on, and now revolving in an echoing stasis, perhaps waiting to be secured to a new body, perhaps just waiting. There is no contentedness to their fate, but also no trepidation. Even acceptance requires a willing mind. There is only servitude to the living and a commitment to the deeds they enacted in their time. It’s silent here and overwhelmingly bizarre. I know I am still alive.

I try to get up.

Struggling to my feet for a final time I look up to see Ed tactfully thumping down the hill. He crushes the world beneath his feet, and pays no mind to the thousand streaming delusions around him. Standing upright against the pull of gravity, his ignorance to this world is the justice of his. He appears as some great Pagan deity, moving freely between realms to make changes as he wills. He takes me by my shoulder, and pushes me back on the ground.
I wonder if I’m being subjugated back to the Underworld for a moment before submitting to time and confusion. I’m in no state to exert my presence. Accepting this, some pressure is relieved from the world around me and there is a short, subtle consensus. I am no longer a trespasser, but a frightened and unexpected visitor. I observe the faces and the trees and the sky until it all becomes a bramble of dead and living matter. Life is a short, incredible burst of energy and experience; there is only so much our senses will ever allow us to be aware of.
There is wind through the trees. While I was gazing out from this planet, peering through the opaque blue sky, the eyes closed. The faces were just dead leaves. And I saw Cote, crouched over and checking on me one more time.
I was home, but it was different now. It felt like I had glimpsed eternity. Consciousness, and this evolved state of being was some explosion of change and activity that I could develop and explore but is altogether a short, momentary excursion.
Thankful to slowly slip back into a confined sense of self, I flip over onto my back and hold my hands on my stomach. Watching my friends question me and being unable to answer yet, I smile and admire their exuberant, innocent faces; so full of life and all its potential. I begin to remember my family and school and oh crap, I have homework due tomorrow.
Staring out into the sky above and knowing there is so much endless space beyond this rock, I decide my brain is too fragile and sensitive. I shouldn’t do drugs again, and should instead appreciate sobriety and cognizance the way humans have adapted to thus far. My curiosity about drugs is mostly gone, but my curiosity for life has only changed. I want to learn all there is to know about life, and accept that death may be more traumatizing the more attached I am to this perspective. I want to end suffering and create lasting covenants between humans who can sustain this plane.

I want to confirm the opportunity to experience life in peace.