Afterwards, I wondered whether our souls had taken the form of smoke.
At the time, there were seven of us. In the room a flattened mattress pad, Christmas lights and an open window. The piece was stocked with salvia, a powerful legal hallucinogen that quickly materializes in mental motions and dissipates into nothingness only minutes after. A green grass-like substance, looking common enough, like straightened sticks of green tea. Crushed and furrowed like a marionette with severed strings. It collapses into a bowl with relative ease.
The first took a big hit, lighting the herb and inwardly howling the substance. Capricious breaths mounted an offensive against the brain and the lungs and expanded once inside. Robert held his breath and exhaled out of the open window, melancholy and overwrought with patience. Then the giggles hit and his hands went to his face and he crumpled into the corner, uttering a noise whose underlying assertion could not be distinguished as happiness or mania.
“Oh my God, you guys,” he ejaculated. Laughter circled the room as he writhed in ecstasy.
“I have to try this”
“What is it like?”
“It’s like a movie, guys. I’m in Blockland.” Another hysterical fit of laughter rode through the room.
The piece rotated to the packing guru. Richard tinseled the bowl with more salvia and packed it before handing it over to Tim, who nervously glanced at Russell, still petting himself between sob-like hiccups of laughter in the corner. Tim lit the salvia and inhaled deeply, holding his breath until he couldn’t take it anymore. He turned towards the window and exhaled, immediately engulfed in a fit of giggles.
“It’s hitting me,” he whispered, red and giggly. “It’s like I’m really high.”
“Do you see anything?”
“No, I’m just really high.”
“I gotta try this,” Daniel said sternly, taking the piece from Tim. “I don’t care if I die doing this.”
The moonlight pierced through the window and etched its allowed silhouette onto the mattress. We all looked outside and listened, but only holes of selfish laughter and illusion filled our ears.
We watched Daniel light the salvia and inhale. And silence took the room hostage: even the magical euphoria of the others had drowned off and was replaced by a sense of reverence and we asked ourselves whether something holy was happening. Daniel’s mouth didn’t leave the piece for what seemed like an eternity, remaining steadfast even when we thought we knew it wouldn’t. Our eyes circled the room, perusing the reality of ourselves and of the situation, only finding disbelief and insecurity in each others’ eyes. Daniel put the piece down and moved towards the open window. A cloud moved, permitting the moonlight to fill his face.
And from the angle I saw, it looked like he might howl to the moon and embrace some primal instinct we had all forgotten so long ago that used to make us human. But his eyes just stared outwards and I wondered what he saw as the smoke seeped slowly from his mouth, arcing out to the silver-lining of clouds, the moonlight, the stars and into the ether that would forever be unknown to man.
The smoke settled somewhere far beyond what I could see or imagine and all I could think was that maybe our souls had left the room and found something better, leaving our bodies behind somewhere between the heavens and the unknown depths of nothingness.
