Passing Out is the Psychedelic Opposite of Ego Death

Last winter I fainted in my old, dingy, backwards-plumbed Bedford-Stuyvesant bathroom. It began with a tingle and a not knowing. It arrived soon after I got up from the dungeon that was my roommate’s queen sized, blanket ridden bed. He and I had just begun watching Past Lives, our faces coated in green clay, the air conspicuously hazy from water bottle weed. Supine and borderline indignant at needing to rise, we headed to wash the muck off of our faces, preparing to reveal to ourselves the glowing skin waiting to be unearthed from underneath the masks.

Realistically it began much earlier than that first tingle. Perhaps with months of unintentional starvation. Or the rapid daily consumption of Vyvanse whose confected energy was not properly utilized. Likely it was a blend of both. A misfire set off by the half pack of camels I’d accidentally smoked that weekend. Perhaps it began with quitting my job. Or with the progression into hating my roommate. Or maybe I had just spent all winter hiding in my bedroom and my body starting seeking another way out.

I sit down in front of the toilet following the instinct to hurl. This is perhaps the only action that is simultaneously self-inflicted and a complete seizure of bodily control. My roomate looks over at the results and positions a sandwich between my face and the bowl. I tell him I worry I’m going to lose consciousness. He hands me the sandwich again. I glance back and forth between him and the porcelain tub, deciding his arm is the softer place to land. It surprises me the disdain you can feel towards someone you need desperately. I collapse into him, managing to direct my will away from the ground.

I’m in a tunnel now. Spinning spinning spinning. Everything is cool toned and bright, like the crack in a computer screen or something taken by a satellite. All I can hear is my name. All I can see is my face, right in the middle of the tunnel. It, I, occupies my entire field of vision. The atmosphere is how I’d imagine the room through which you leave the living feels, the way survivors describe a brush with death. I realize the only way out is to go towards myself. There is no light to walk into, no memory, no voice of an elder, only me.

Grace Grace Grace Grace Grace. I wake up and I am still alive.