morphine dreams
Hello. I hope you are all doing as well as possible. I’ve been doing pretty well myself.
I left Italy. I’m in Amsterdam now. The Dutch are fun, but not as funny as the Italians. I miss getting yelled at. The Dutch are blunt, but too polite at the same time.
Amsterdam is a beautiful city. It’s fun to imagine myself living here for more than just a month, but then I remember I’d have to live here to live here.
Before I left Italy, I visited a childhood friend in Orbetello, a small beach town several hours from Rome. No one in the whole town spoke English and the villa I stayed in lacked clean drinking water, but it only cost a few dollars to rent a Vespa and the beach was perfect. You could walk out into the water the length of a football field and still only be submerged up to your waist. The water was clear blue and the Italian men walked along the beach in tiny bathing suits. In the evening we took the scooters up to the top of a mountain overlooking the sea and the town of Orbetello. Atop this mountain sat an ancient castle wherein certain viewing spots had been set up. We sat and experienced the panorama. I felt the wind everywhere and the sun hit the rocks in such a way that the whole city glowed in soaking wet light. The sea went forever, only interrupted by a small island a few hundred meters from the beach. I saw caves tucked into the angular rock face of the island and wondered what it would feel like to fall forever. I felt a kind of anxiety wash over me. I knew this was as good as it gets. There is something terrifying in the beauty of the world. A seagull flew by real slow. I felt the breeze off its wings and wondered how it would feel to fall forever. We threw rocks off the side of the cliff into the widest bluest sea in the world trying to make any semblance of a splash. This place was and is, I only am. I want to memorize the topography. I want to be a bird. I want to see from above.
I spent the evening playing guitar and drinking wine. My old friend’s girlfriend told me about her military dad and how she detested war. She told me about the Army bases she grew up on, the movie theaters and playgrounds. She said it was the safest place in the world. After every few sips of wine she refilled her glass, insisting she drank a bottle a night and felt nothing. I guess Italy will do that to you.
What people forget is that Van Gogh painted Starry Night from the confines of his cell in a mental hospital. What people forget is that the Two Headed Calf sees the same stars twice. What people forget is that Ockham was a theologian, Heidegger a racist fool, and Jack Kerouac an absent father.
I am studying esotericism at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. My class consists of energy healers, spiritual leaders, psychonauts, New Age theosophists, and born-again Yogi pantheists. In all ways, I am the most “normal”. There’s a man in his sixties whose wife practices “automatic writing”. She apparently channels a spirit of some kind and allows that spirit to write through her. I am treading in unfamiliar waters. I have made a couple friends here, but I spend several days at a time completely alone. Back to my old ways after a month of constant social interaction.
These people, they look through me. Their pupils dilate with the knowledge of higher power. They cast spells, practice rituals, and read tomes. I never saw myself as the stodgy, skeptical academic until I was put in this position as the materialistic oil in the water of enchantment. My professor talks about his psychedelic quests, the order of mystics he and his wife lead, and the spiritual pilgrimages they make across the world. They look at me like I have two heads and honestly I might as well.
The feeling passed, thank god. I don’t feel like a jellyfish anymore. Some amount of normalcy has returned to my psyche now that I am out of the extreme heat and chaos of Rome. I miss Rome. Somewhere under all of those ruins is dirt, real dirt. Ground soil and bedrock. Somewhere under the thousands of years of history is nature.
Unfortunately, I will never feel as good as I have felt. Drugs will do that to you. You experience heaven and are expected to go back to Earth. I understand why people die. Sometimes it’s worth seeing what is on the other side.
I remember during the heat of the pandemic, I had to get my first of two invasive eye surgeries. During this surgery, they scraped my cornea off with a scalpel and tried to rebuild it with drops of thick riboflavin, green and sticky like honey. I remember after they scraped off my cornea, the nurse showed it to me and then threw it in a small trash can like a used tissue. While they dropped the riboflavin, they blasted my eye with burning hot UV light. I was awake for the whole of it. I asked the doctor not to prescribe me opioids because I feared I would become addicted. A few hours after the procedure, I felt a soreness develop in my eye. Over the course of about an hour it went from irritating to unbearable and I had no medicine to take to quell the pain. The Tylenol and Advil my mom gave me were like bandaids over a thousand bullet holes. I ended up in the emergency room, biting a rag so hard my gums bled all over my shirt. The pain had developed into a full body sensation. I couldn’t open either of my eyes because of the feeling of an icicle growing in my brain. I kept my eyes shut for nineteen hours, experiencing some of the world through sounds muffled by hot pain.
Because it was the peak of the pandemic, all of the beds in the emergency room were occupied, so after completing the triage process, the nurse brought me to a hallway and sat me in a chair. They gave me Lortab, Percocet, OxyContin and I felt no relief. It just got worse and worse. Tears streamed down my cheeks and into my lap, turning my entire face greenish yellow from the leftover riboflavin. In the hallway, a man sat next to me moaning loudly. He said something like, “I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m fucking dying,” and the nurses told him he’s not dying, but then I heard the beeps on his EKG speed up to an alarming rate. Dozens of feet stomped into the room and doctors yelled at one another about cardiac arrest and blood. While the man was being resuscitated a nurse hooked me up to a morphine drip. Almost immediately all pain left my body. I felt the waves of the world still. The voices of the doctors and nurses faded into the muffled distance. The man was surely dying and I could hardly clench my fist as the opium spread to every centimeter of my body, loosening every joint, relieving my body of almost two decades of stress. I was floating in the middle of the ocean. I was staring up at the sky at dusk. Put your head under the shower faucet and plug your ears. I was somewhere between there and dead. I remember laughing. I remember crying from joy, finally relieved from the worst pain I had ever experienced.
The dead man must have died for this. He must have been where I had been. I am sure whoever stabbed him loved him dearly. I need you to know that I go to sleep every night imagining myself in that hospital hallway hooked up to that IV drip. I imagine myself a kite in the endless wind. I imagine myself a wildflower in a field. Weeds are where they are meant to be.
It will rain soon. I need to remember that. It cannot stay dry forever. At some point, the sky gives in and the whole world floods. The canals first, then the lakes, then the seas, then the oceans. Let it take us. Venice is sinking. Pray for those who still sing. When I close my eyes, I see no Orbetello. I see no mountains, no green island floating in the sea, no seagull artfully riding the wind, no ancient castle atop the hill, no town built upon itself. When I close my eyes I see chemicals. When I close my eyes I see impossible peace. We can reach infinity, but it will cost us feeling.