Trip

At a music festival, I took a hit of a stranger's ceramic skull bong. I inhaled slowly as he lit the tube. It crackled, blue sparks popping like a tiny firework. With his hands, he encouraged me to inhale deeply by motioning at his own chest. He then held up a finger to signal me to hold it in before I exhaled. He laughed, smiled, and said yes. The taste in my mouth was chemical.

Afterwards, I asked him what was up with his weed. He said it was spice and told me not to worry, it gave a really mellow high.

Back at our camp, my friends were leaving to go and watch Queens of the Stone Age. I decided against joining them and laid down in my tent to ride out the trip.

I fell unconscious and saw people dressed in colonial attire: women in giant bonnets pushing wooden wheelbarrows full of vegetables; men in broad-brimmed black hats and white stockings. Then the people disappeared, and in their place were candles, bunched together as in churches, stretching infinitely in all directions, like a field of flames.

I left my body and ascended into the night sky, with the candles lingering at the edges of my vision. I hung there, weightless, feeling the warmth and light of the field of flames. I looked back down at my own body and saw the baby Jesus, lying in a manger.

When I awoke, there were empty beer cans and food wrappers strewn all over the ground and the sky was a pallid gray.

I looked up into a dead tree and saw a pair of soiled underwear.