Previously: Part 1, in which I give more background info than you want, and decide to go to Peru.
I’ve never been a particularly spiritual person. I’ve never been rooted in any particular faith since my early childhood. I had even come to realize that I had little faith in pretty much anything, in the strictest sense of the word. Lengthy depression had left me jaded; I had grown incapable of believing in things based solely on belief. But that same lengthy depression had also left me so tired and worn-down that I was willing to try anything. It was a weird place to be.
On top of that, one of the first requirements of the ayahuasca ceremonies is that my system needed to be clear of any other drugs, and that included the Wellbutrin and Zoloft I was taking at the time. The combination hadn’t been doing me a whole lot of good, my general emotional state was ‘completely disinterested in life.’ Still, that was a lot better than ‘wanting to exit life’ so I wasn’t exactly comfortable with the idea of going off them. But if I was going to go through with the ceremonies I had no choice, there was a genuine risk to my life if I tried to mix them with the ayahuasca. Three months before the trip I started the slow process of weaning off what I’d been taking, so that six weeks before the ceremony my system would be clear. It was a lousy process and worse once the drugs were gone. By that time I had pretty much severed contact with the outside world and I tried to simply hold on to the idea that what I was doing served some kind of purpose, that as bad as I felt at least this time it was some kind of step towards feeling better.
Sarah and I left for Peru in early December. It’s a six hour flight from Atlanta to Lima that takes you from the Atlantic coast of the US to the Pacific coast of South America, without ever leaving the Eastern Time Zone. It doesn’t seem like that should be right, but trust me, it is. We played trivia on the seat-back video system and I got a question about Mike Viola (who I opened for in Boston a while ago), of all things, and I tried to watch movies and tv shows I don’t actually like. In other words, it’s a long, boring flight especially if you hate flying, and I do, and especially if you’re flying at night, which we were.
We got into Lima at midnight, shambled through customs and out in to the night, taking a taxi to a hotel for literally just the night. It was eight hours until our flight to Iquitos and we’d decided we didn’t want to try and sleep in the empty airport. Both of us had tried to pick up enough Spanish as we could beforehand but, like everyone always says, the gap between studying a language and actually trying to practice it in conversation with native speakers is pretty wide. It made for a surreal experience to start the trip. Our amiable driver spoke better English than we did Spanish (Un poco. Mi Espanol es muy terrible was one of the first phrases I became fluent with), and was happy to practice it with us, so we had a lengthy, halting, multi-lingual conversation about the population of Lima versus Atlanta and why Chinese food is so popular in Peru. We drove along barren-seeming beaches in the dark and through cramped but empty streets that nevertheless included a fire-juggler looking for tips, until we reached the hotel. It was similarly cramped, in a way that suggested it was never built to be a hotel, with a tiny, glass elevator (with a swinging door), paper-thin walls and windows that faced the hallways.
I tried to sleep, but weighed down by the drunken voices reverberating through the building, the six hours in an airplane seat, the three months without meds, the knowledge that I was in a place where I could barely communicate with those around me and the general feeling of having untethered myself from any feeling of security I’d ever had, what little emotional scaffolding I had finally collapsed. Sarah tried to calm me as best she could, as tired and stretched thin as she felt herself, and eventually I fell asleep listening quietly to an old episode of This American Life and hanging my temporary sanity on the solidity of familiar sound.
Next time: Things pick up, I swear.