A Trip Of Growth

The night was like any other late summer night. I was 17 looking for a place in the world and found myself face to face with a beautiful blueish grey and white stem. With a new found respect and admiration for the funky fungi i ate it raw without a second thought to the god awful taste or the butterflies in my stomach and my affirmation was this was going to give me "Spiritual Growth". To the unexperienced, as i was at the time, the truth of growth can be seen as sunshine and rainbows. The actual truth being that sometimes to open the heart you need to clean the wounds first. Ask and thou shalt recive.

As the night moved on nothing in particular seemed extrodinary. My thoughts and perception found a new rythym to dance to as i watched the wallpaper wave over the walls like a gentle ocean. Though, as per mushrooms tend to do the conversation turned to things that began to expand my beliefs and perceptions even more. As the conversation faded and i was left to my own devices i began to reflect on myself and the reality i inhabit alone in the background. As i began to review past trips and experiences something dawned on me, "My perception creates my reality". With that like the crack of a whip my minds eye race through my life in a tunnel of memories too quick to even feel the emotions, that is until it came to the end. The end was not what you might think, the end was a wound that cut deep, a wound that still flares up to this day. The image of my now ex girlfriend cheating on me in full high definition, so as not to miss a thing.

What was a beautiful appiphony turned quickly into the fear that drove me away from loving myself. Such a poetic term of events coincidence does not do it justice. As if god himself had constructed the perfect way to build me up only to reveal my foundation was not equipped to handle the load. With the fleeting image and the almost obsessive need to call her and tell her "i knew now there was no point in lying', i regained my compsure and decided i was no longer in the mood to socialize.

Thinking back to my walk home, it felt oddly peaceful, the numbness and the surreal understanding that regardless of whatever anyone has done to me, i created the reality that allowed these things to take place. Furthermore i created the mindset that had my confidence lying outside my own heart. I mistake not so easily understood to a kid in love, to a kid desperate for any affection to surpress his underlying dis ease of who he was.

As i lay in bed, now fully aware the level of depression cocaine and alcohol tried to hide in the months before, that underlying peace of mind never faded. Even as a thought of suicide came through my peripherals it did not seem to shake me down as you might expect. Laying there, a victim of the human condition i allowed myself to take on, dancing my hands through the shadows the blinds on my window cast a path of inner peace and truth laid before me. Unwittingly striving for a better tomorrow uncertain there was one.

Now i sit here writing, over five years later smiling at the boy i was and in love with the man i have become.