Beyond Reality

TW: suicide, drug usage

I saw a UFO bend across the sky. It was night, and I was standing on a trail with my friends, smoking weed. My friend said, “What is that?” 

It was pale blue and shaped like an egg. I watched it for three seconds before it, seemingly, turned its engines to us. There were five violet lights, three stacked on top of each other on the left, and two on the right. It reminded me of seeing the back of an X-Wing in Star Wars. The lights moved upwards in a coiling motion, leaving the light trail behind. Then it disappeared. No noise. 

There were five of us. We each recounted exactly what we saw to prove we weren’t lying. I thought it was interesting that my friend thought we were all lying to him. This proved to me––my observation of his coming to grips with his reality––that what we just saw was going to be left unexplained. 

I awoke from a dream in the red light of my room. My phone had just finished ringing. And, in the remnants of my dreaming mind, I could sense someone’s presence. His name was Capital STEEZ, a rapper from Brooklyn. In 2012, he jumped off the roof of his record label’s building in the Flatiron District, killing himself. 

He was obsessed with the number forty-seven. This, he believed, being representative of the perfect balance between the fourth and seventh chakras, the heart and the mind. The number that called me had a plus one at the end of the sequence. I usually saw this at the beginning of a number, in America, part of its area code. But this placement led me to add up all the numbers individually. The sum, before the plus one, was forty-six.

I remember feeling scared, like I, or my sense of reality, had just been violated. But I also felt different after this, like I’d been given a purpose. Whenever I see his number, forty-seven, I think he’s watching me. I give him a wink to let him know I see him. 

Perhaps this is like a horoscope. I would never admit this is real, but that doesn’t stop me from believing it. 

I don’t know why he might be observing me. Perhaps he observes everyone who knows him. Perhaps his rap group can share similar stories. Some people think he sacrificed himself so he can come back in 2047. The date of his death was December 23rd, 2012. 12+23+12=47.

My dad told me, once, that he had a pimple in his forehead. It was hard, and when he popped it, out came a crystallite ball. It was something that should have come out of earth’s crust, pressurized over thousands of years. He didn’t understand it. He put it in medicine cabinet, but the next day it was gone. He wholly believes it was aliens. 

My mom was a Buddhist. My dad used to take psychedelics in his metal band. My sister wouldn’t drink Dr. Pepper because she believed the number twenty-three was stalking her (“23 flavors”). 

My close friend would see the number twenty-seven everywhere. Whenever I watch a movie, I take count of the random numbers people use. Twenty-seven shows up the most. I’m not even surprised when I hear it anymore. 

I try to hold on to reality’s tangibility no matter how far it bends. I wonder how often of what I see or think is hallucination, like a game I play with myself to keep me busy in the midst of experiencing a consciousness that is fully inexplainable. 

The oldest humans used to look at the stars and think there were gods up there. When they looked, they realized the vastness of their loneliness, and so they filled it with beings and wars and multidimensional entities, in the image of themselves, because that is as far as they could compute, and it is still as far as we can compute. 

There are even things we know of that are inexplainable. What is between zero and one? And how can I touch you but still not be touching you? What makes up the atoms? What makes up the quarks? Is the very structure of reality floating in… nothingness? Even our concept of nothing is something. Try to imagine nothing. 

I decided to go on a God trip. This is when someone takes a copious amount of psychedelics. I weighed ten grams of psilocybin mushrooms and blended them in a smoothie. 

I would stay in my backyard for the beginning of the trip, and move to my room where I would turn on music or a movie. My partner was at work, but she would check in with me. I fell into a dark pit while I sat in the backyard patio. 

It was like I had fallen through my skull. The real world looked like a one-inch picture frame, and everything else was dark, like in Get Out. I felt I had stepped outside the bounds of my consciousness and was observing it like a cephalophore. 

I had experienced war, like every blade ever driven into someone’s flesh was being done unto me. I was scratching the floor of my room, trying to escape. 

The movie I had turned on, Austin Powers in Goldmember, turned real. The characters kept opening my door, staring at me. 

I had now convinced myself that I was in the hospital. That I had fallen in the backyard and hit my head, and I was now experiencing something similar to, if not, death. Therefore, I realized, I could do whatever I wanted, and so I tried to fly away out of my second-story window, back into the more sober reality.

I was knocked unconscious and I broke my legs. My neighbors had heard the crash and went to check on me, and my partner raced to the hospital to meet me. This jarring shift from ego death to being laid up in a hospital bed made it difficult to believe that I wasn’t still tripping, that I was present in the reality I had known before. I knew I wanted to go back. It took me several months to meet a level of trust in our reality to where I could function again, but I still have my doubts.