#harmala

this was back in Ithaca, my then-semi-girlfriend who is involved in almost all my non-deliriant drug stories had randomly gotten real interested in Syrian rue after I’d done a little research on it since in my Sanskrit class we kept reading excerpts of, I think the Rg-Veda, that talked about Indra and some other devas grinding up soma and drinking it for ritual use. she ordered a cheap-ass bag of rue seeds and one day was just like “it’s here and I figured out how to extract it, meet me on the steps of that condemned Masonic temple we always sit at”. 

so I did, we found an unmarked VHS there and took it home bc serendipity or something. toss it in the VCR and it’s two random Pokémon episodes. what the fuck. we start pounding out the seeds while kinda watching the show, get them beat up enough we figure it’s good to start cooking etc. in the time it takes to prepare it we watch the Pokémon episodes and all of Princess Bride while the horrific smell of harmala filled the air and her roommate tries to make sure none of us are gonna die or throw up everywhere, whatever (THAT ROOMMATE WAS SUCH A NORMIE BTW).

we drink it and it tastes many times worse than it smelled. many many times. it takes a fucckin while for each of us to down our portions, and fifteen minutes later she goes to the bathroom and throws up. I hold my course. suddenly everything is growing an ethereal blue aura of energy around it that has this beautiful elastic quality to it. a ghost made of this energy is just casually watching us from the other chair as we sit there, body load making it so hard to move. I realize I can control the energies and spread them around the room and consume them, and I try to communicate this to her but she’s dead silent. 

I go throw up. we try to retreat to her bedroom so we can lay down and try to feel less horrified and ill, but she throws up maybe two more times in the bathroom on the way. every sentence we say to each other feels like an hour of back-and-forth conversation in an enormous vertical halo-like shape. there’s like fifteen minute pauses between our sentences but we don’t notice cuz we’re both mentally inserting active dialogue into the silence. the energy ghost is back, staring at me again. we pass out for a little, my friend throws up maybe two more times, I throw up maybe three, it’s the most physically grueling and disorienting experience possible. everything is happening at once, everything has auras and powers and the walls have religious stories projected onto them and I literally can’t say anything that isn’t a prayer to some unknown demon. 

I go to the bathroom to throw up again. this time, as I kneel at the toilet, another ghost is standing over me (the room is too small for this so it doesn’t make sense), and is narrating to me the story of the death of a medieval European reincarnation of Sibyl, one of the women living in my body. Sibyl is a witch being publicly executed. I am a witch being publicly executed, I’m trapped in the stocks of a guillotine, vomiting in horror of what is about to happen as the people in attendance scream at me horrible insults and slurs in Middle French, the blade is let loose and my head rolls off the body into the mess below, still partly conscious and destroyed by it all. eventually the ghost leaves and I’m back in the bathroom, laying on the floor. the energies are angry and I need to leave. I go back to the bed, the body load is at its absolute worst and thankfully we both pass out again for about five hours.