What happened in Peru? (part 10)

Previously: I made a stupid choice.

One of the requirements at Blue Morpho was that you took part in the first ceremony, and you could opt to not take any more of the drug beyond that. But they preferred that you still participate in the ceremonies. They said that aya stays in your system for days, and that, for some people, it can still affect you in a ceremony even if you haven’t taken a dose. That wasn’t true for me. I lay there on the mat for the whole ceremony, in my head, and it was horrible.

Once, when I was maybe six or seven, I was at Six Flags and I rode the Spindle Top. Basically it was a round room that spun really fast, everyone stood against the wall and the floor would lower out from under you and everyone would stay fixed against the wall from the force of the spinning. Which was like magic to a six year old. So I rode it. The room spun, the floor lowered… and I went down with the floor.

It was like that. I kept waiting for the mareación to sweep me up, I listened to Don Alberto’s icaros and hoped and hoped and nothing happened. My brain churned it over and over; my depression, what I’d felt the night before and that day, and how it was all gone now, lost. The depression won and everything was hopeless. It was a pit, as dark as any I’d been in. And while sometimes I wonder if I DID have an experience that night, and it was just a bad one, the truth is there were no hallucinations. It was just me, in that room, on the floor, crying, because I could hear everyone around me, swept up in the moment, and I was just on a mat in the dark.

And ceremonies last about three hours or so.

Because it was the final night, it ended with a process where the shaman comes to each participant and performs an icaro specifically for them. The aya “opens” a person up to the world, totally exposed, so once the ceremonies are complete these songs are meant to sort of stitch a person back together. So they can go back to the real world and function. Based on where I was laying, Hamilton was who came over to me. He asked me how I was doing and I told him I wasn’t doing well, that’d I’d made a huge mistake in not taking aya that night. He said something to the effect that it didn’t matter now, there was no point in focusing on that decision, it was past me now. I mean, it made sense, but it was not at all what I needed to hear. He performed a brief icaro over me and moved on. I felt so despondent. I didn’t trust him any more, and I sat and wished that Don Alberto had come over instead.

Another story of my childhood: when I was about five years old, I think, I was taken to see “Disney on Ice” at the Omni. At one point during the show, an usher came over to me and asked me if I wanted to be part of the show. I was an incredibly shy kid, but even so I said yes, and so I followed her down the steps to the side of the rink. We stood there, waiting for whatever it was I was going to be part of, and I was so nervous and uncomfortable. Finally, I timidly asked if I could go sit back down until they were ready for me, and she said yes. I walked back up the stairs and sat back down. When the next section of the show started, clowns came out onto the ice pushing giant brooms, and each one had a lucky kid riding on top of the broom head.

Just like when I was five, I’d said “no” to something, out of fear, out of nervousness, out of uncertainty, and I’d missed the ride again.

Next: What little framework this story had completely breaks down.