Adventures in Ketamine - K-1: Asia. I'm in Asia
How can I describe the indescribable? The writer in me, who even as I’m immersing myself within the vast and wildly vivid space where the trip takes place, tries to assign words to the experience. What are words anyway? Words are silly. Words will always fail me when I try explaining what it’s like going inside. It’s a feeling anyway. Inside is a feeling. Trying to give qualities from tangible life—that is to say, life outside—to that which exists within…well, words will always fail.
Ketamine.
In a way it’s like being lowered into another world. Or uplifted into one. It’s a world that exists all around us but we can’t see it until the walls we’ve built around our consciousness dissolve. And they do dissolve here. Ketamine is a place to me; an ever-changing, evolving, luminous dimension.
It’s a little like those Magic Eye pictures, where you relax your eyes and the psychedelic landscape reveals itself as some secret picture you can only see if you give into it just right. It’s like that, only you’re inside the picture…or maybe you are the Magic Eye.
If I were a painter, I’d paint it. Since I’m a writer—or, at least, masquerading as one—I’ll do my best to write it.
Wall hooks, eyes, boobs, Asian men in a boat.
He can’t get a vein.
He finds them, he just can’t keep them. After the third or fourth poke, I wonder if it’s a sign. My veins are rejecting this treatment before it even starts. Should I leave? No. No, I want this. I need this.
After thirty minutes, needle changes, and an equipment error, the needle sits in the crook of my left arm and I recline on a chair in a nondescript, windowless room with white walls and white door. I stare at a set of hooks on the wall until they become a pair of eyes, then boobs, then two Asian men in a boat, then the only things in the room.
I’m in. I’m in.
I want to see it all. I don’t close my eyes like I thought I would. I don’t contemplate life. My monkey mind jabbers and jabbers, trying to make sense of what I’m seeing, yammering on like some annoying person behind me who hasn’t taken the hint that I’m not listening, when a sassy woman in a red pant suit and curly black hair bursts on the scene and tells the chatter to stop. I fumble for my phone on the table beside me and manage—somehow, don’t ask me how—to type out the word Geneera to my husband. I think that is the tiny, sassy woman’s name.
I relax and let the room change. The dimmed overhead fluorescent light is now a bright skylight. Cool, I’m in a room with a skylight! Then more light filters through the trees in the window that suddenly appears on my left. I can almost see the jungle out of the corner of my eye. I’m in Asia. This is Asia.
The blood pressure cuff on my right arm snaps me from the Orient and back to the sterile white room. No. No. Shiiiiit. I want to go back, so I watch the hooks on the wall as they change again. Eyes. Boobs. The only things in the room. And I return to Asia, in a hotel room. There are bunk beds beside me, and a woman sitting to my right, on the floor, holding a bowl of food.
The room continues to morph and I go with it, gladly. Willingly. I travel from one foreign room to the next. I guess that’s why they call it a trip.
I leave, unsteadily, with a goofy smile. My husband doesn’t ask me right away how it went, but I wish he would. Even if he did, I wouldn’t know what to say. I could never explain it. Not really. How do you share with someone a trip to Asia on a magic carpet? The beauty? The absolute freedom from yourself? I want to clutch that freedom that I can already feel slipping through my fingers as the “real” world clamps back down around me. If I could live with one toe on that magic carpet all the time, feel a fraction of the freedom that blew the lid off my mind for the last hour, I’d be changed. If everyone did it, if everyone felt one ounce of that freedom, even for a second, they’d know there’s more than fear, more than stress, more than the hell we put ourselves through. I felt it. Now, all but a dusting is fading away. The memories don’t do it justice. But I’m smiling. A shiny, new-life smile. I am free. Now I know it’s possible.