Where Does Your Soul Go When You're On Drugs?

 I no longer know how to go through doors thanks to an acid trip I went on years ago in Oregon. I was alone in my room listening to Tipper, I’m sure, and I couldn’t figure out how to use my hands. I tried to go into the living room to ask my friend how hands are supposed to work, what I’m supposed to do with them. The only thing between me and my quest for answers was my bedroom door which I locked what felt like decades ago during a fit of psychedelic paranoia. Because my hands were a mystery to me I couldn’t figure out the lock, so I just stood there crying. I was convinced I was trapped and that was how my life was going to go forevermore. Stuck in a room with no exit. Since then I have a moment of panic anytime I encounter any sort of door. I get especially nervous when I have to fumble with the key and wiggle it around. I’m always filled with embarrassment and fear around doors. 

In some ways this struggle is symbolic. The soul leaves out the window and life is lived by those who can go through doors. Passing through entryways means you’re alive. Being able to exist freely, enter and exit wherever whenever by your own volition is a privilege only a few know of. The rest of us contemplate jumping out the window in Berlin during a serious drug binge. 

Some go through doors and they never come back out. A friend sells all his shit to buy heroin, his stash runs out and he has nothing left to sell, so he hangs himself in his crack den of a room. We were 18. Why some addicts end that way I cannot say. I’m an addict, too, and I don’t like looking too closely at our end times behavior. Knowing I could get that low, that there were days when I was that low, scares me. I’m scared because I know that one day I could abandon the window fantasy entirely and choose to go through a door and end it. And then what happens to my soul? Does it ever leave the room? Maybe that’s why people believe in ghosts. Souls get trapped in a room and weren’t given any options for escape. No one thinks of opening up the windows when they find a body. I know for sure that the soul of an addict on the brink isn’t a nice one. We’re panicked and twitchy. Those ghosts will haunt us all because they never were able to get that final hit. The hit that felt “right.” The hit that made us believe we would never have to use again because we got what we needed from the drugs. Unfortunately that’s not how drug addiction works. As addicts we are never able to fully rest. The body keeps the score, some say, but it’s really the soul that has to stand the test of time, and our souls are relentless fiends. Our bodies will decompose just fine. But a troubled mind does not stop toiling in misery after suicide or an overdose. Energy doesn’t die, only changes forms. 

I remember when I first did psychedelics aged 16 or so. I was so fucking stupid about it. I thought because I had read Ginsberg and Electric Koolaid Acid Test and hung out with druggy people and had a few dealers in my phone that meant I could explore hidden worlds that other people just didn’t get because they weren’t getting high the way I was getting high. Fuck a door, I am the door. You know how that goes. I was smoking medical weed as an afternoon snack which meant, I believed, that I was living with a sort of temporal ease. Everything was super fluid, super chill, super egotistical. Really egotistical. Of course, when you’re doing drugs at 16 you’re not thinking about a future or that one day a friend you sold Percocet to is gonna die alone in a room. I was not thinking that I needed salvation, or that any of us did for that matter. We listened to Lana Del Rey on cough syrup and that was enough at the time. 

I miss that naivete. A friend sends me a piece of art he made while high that says “I used to feel now I’m just acting.” Ketamine, man. We were all such fucking drug addicts. Now I can’t even open a fucking door. I wonder if that means I’m even alive anymore. Alive in the way I used to be, no, and thank fuck for that. But did my soul leave that window in Berlin? Were the windows open when I took that acid trip in Oregon? When was the last time I took a pill of ecstasy and didn’t contemplate dying? Something along the way has definitely escaped me. I have the hospital bracelets to prove it. I’ve gone through too many windows. Not enough doors. I’ve lived too much. Experienced too little. I play Lana because at least now I know I’m looking for salvation.