She looks heart broken for me, as you would expect. It’s real though, I think. I think she might actually care that this happened to me.

“At first it was like the tide rolling in. Inexorably the anxiety began to build. It began to wash away my resolve and self-control like never before or since has anything ever done. Then, something in my brain fell apart. It felt like the physical mechanism connecting me to reality came unhinged. It was a physical pain like none other, and it felt like it was coming from inside of my soul.

“That’s when I saw God. He was not that hippy bastard you see on the walls of any church you go to. No, God was unfathomable in sight. My eyes melted out of my skull, but still I could see him. He spoke, and my ears bled. He spoke in a language I did not understand, but his meaning came through with such clarity… He told me he was displeased with me, and soon, so soon, he would bring his reckoning down on me. Until then though, he wanted me to know what hell was like, so that I would know what my fate was.

“God tortured me.

My grandfather told me I passed out and fell to the floor and began clawing at myself until I bled all over. He had to use belts to tie me to his bed to keep me from harming myself. He said it lasted for the time it was supposed to… but when I woke up and finally became aware again… All I could do was keep asking him over and over what time it was.

The silence that hangs over us after those words seemed unending. Finally she reaches out and hugs me and says, “You don’t have to tell me any more than that…”

I know what she means. She can’t hear all of this at once. She’ll listen, but I’m scaring her… Still, this is so much more than I’ve ever told anyone.

She says, “So, is that way you’re an atheist? Because it would seem something like that would make you believe you were screwed. And so, to compensate for damnation you would simply stop believing in it all.”

“No, really I have accepted what happened to me to be what it was; an acid trip. It certainly opened up my mind to millions of other possibilities. I never considered suicide until after this day. But no, I became an atheist because I read the bible from the beginning to end and decided that I didn’t agree. Very simple there…”

She smiles, “Always so direct.” She is relieved to take the subject away from that horrible story.

I smile back at her, steering away from the story itself, “Anyway… Acid is a hallucinogen and pot has a mild hallucinogen in it… It would be stupid to ever smoke any of it because it might trigger a LSD flashback or something. I’ve never felt ok enough to risk ever going through what happened that day again, you know? I am pretty much over all of it now. I can actually sleep without thinking about it at night…

“But, I do think this does to contribute to why I feel so trapped and isolated. I spent a long time learning to repress panic attacks set on by remembering casually the events of that day. I’ve learned to repress my emotions so much that I got cut off from people entirely. I guess I am having to learn it’s ok to let my guard down. I feel safer outside of my own head now than I used to.”

Her smile is so beautiful it helps me come back from the sadness that this story has instilled in me. She’s my anchor now, helping me finally overcome the obstacle of my own mind. Together we become free. Our collective saves my wayward mind. I am not alone because I have given her a home in my head, and she has done the same.

Finally, I write something below the darker lines all ready written on the page:

Love is more than sex. Love is more than giving up things for someone. Love is more than sacrifice.

Love is saving someone’s life in a way no one else ever could. Love makes sense while never making sense at all.

Love is.

Right?