The right stuff

She had everything else ready. A playlist of ambient music long enough 7 or 8 epiphanies, a bottle of tropical juice, the mirror on the table, fresh and clean from any dust and residue, a metallic tube, the luminosity from the screen computer has been set to turn itself down after 60 seconds and socks had been rolled up in front of the control lights of the speakers. The curtains are drawn shut.

Everything is there apart from the key element. And key it was indeed. It opened the door to another world inside the mind, where the muse liked to dwell.

It had been over half an hour since she got the text. It read: "8 mins away". Another drug dealer had once told her he always said 8 minutes because the figure 8 is also the sign for infinity, he was therefore always truthful and on time. Viktor doesn’t use such tricks. But he is never on time, and his stuff often sucks, so she saved him as Victor the Loser in her contacts.

She snatches a piece of skin from the corner of her index finger with her teeth and pulls its skinny string up to the top of the nail where it snaps and blood runs down the fresh canal of torn up flesh. 

Her phone rings. It’s him. She picks up. 

“They gonna be outside in 2 mins."

"No worries. What car?"

"Black Audi."

"Cool thanks."

She relocates the two 20 pounds notes from her messy computer desk to her bra and flies down the stairs, zips up one, then the other boot, and rushes to the door. She knows it never is just two minutes anyway, and it’s awkward to wait on the street for a car to pull up but it would be more annoying to miss him and have to wait even longer. She walks up and down the same few meters of pavement like a streetwalker until the car slows down next to her. She leans into the passenger window.

The exchange happens very fast. In one fluid motion the money wis transformed into the little plastic baggies in her hand.

The next exchange is the good evening wishes from both parties.

She walks back to her place, compulsively fingering the micro-haul in her pocket.

Don’t lose them now!

Once inside, she inspects the quality of the product by holding it to the light. She smiles at the result.

You want your ketamine to be shardy, long tiny crystal flakes of pure white, but you don’t want to snort it in that state. The capillaries inside your nose are very delicate, the shards would damage the lining unnecessarily.

You can use cards to crush it on a flat surface, ideally not a bank card because of all the dents and ridges. A travel or library card is best, unless you actually invest in a metallic one that only serves this aforementioned purpose. Once you crushed the drug, the consistency should remind you of powdered sugar and quite satisfyingly have doubled in volume.

Alice personally prefers to crush it directly inside the bag to avoid the mess. She uses the same pink jade roller she tries to remember to incorporate into the currently mostly non existent skincare routine to combat the early wrinkles on her anxious forehead.

Lately she’s been stuck in a rut, tired and uninspired. She needs to break the pattern and get new perspective. Nothing quite does it like putting your head through a metaphorical washing machine that diffract your thought like a prism does to light.

Ketamine is a dissociative anaesthetic commonly used in medicine because it doesn’t affect the breathing and heart functions. When used recreationally you want to take just enough to reach a dreamlike space whilst still remaining fully conscious. To meet her muse, Alice has to go down a space known as the K Hole. This is where the magic happens. 

For someone her height and weight a line of about 4x0.5 centimetres is the ticket.

You know the saying about ‘It’s about the journey not the destination’? Well in this case it is the opposite. Alice doesn’t like travelling anywhere and the journey into the depths of her own mind is no exception. She’s very prone to car sickness, she’s terrified of flying and snorting drugs, actually not the nicest feeling! You usually want things coming out of your nose, not going in.

Even all smoothed out, the hit of powder, it still stings and makes your eyes water.

As she does it, Alice’s body also convulses in a retching motion that’s quite unpleasant. Sometimes the body says no when the mind says yes.

A few minutes after the bump, there’s the sour/bitter drip in the back of your throat. That’s where the juice comes in.

The hard part being over, she can now start the music and recline back into her seat, close her eyes and wait for the show to start.

At first nothing happens, you feel a comfortable numbness in your body. Aches and pains grow milder. Soon enough you start to discern images, you are floating over a path of red rocks alongside a forest of identical red trees dancing in the wind. It reminds you of being in the car as a child but now you are not jaded and immune to the beauty of simple and familiar things. Each rock feels special, each tree is a blessing.

The music is setting the pace and commanding changes of scenery. Your closed eyelids are a cinema screen that shows you the birth and death of entire civilisations and underwater universes or crumbling mountains that turn into levitating sculptures. They breath for you.

The muse feeds you pictures to decipher, sprinkling bursts of epiphanies on top. Uncovering the depths of your own or maybe the collective subconscious across millenia. From lives past, present or future, from other realities or galaxies.

Whatever you are seating on become your rollercoaster ride, Alice is gliding hers over an office space being blown apart by gusts of wind.

She feels grateful to witness what she calls and thinks of as the "building level". Where life itself practices and creates the visual world that we know.

She’s eager to gather all she can from the stacking of the building blocks of everything that can be perceived. Time and space melt at her convenience and she reconnects with what truly matters to her. A beetle is spinning at the centre of a nebula, and right now that is just what she needed to see for her creativity to come rushing back in.

This is the right stuff.