musicians, molly and mayhem

i dont know im trying to document something important here

I have been indulging myself in having fun lately. There are endless new experiences for me to feel, and I must allow myself to feel every single one of them without leaving even one stone unturned. This weekend, I agreed to do Molly on a whim with someone I’d been seeing for maybe a week. I have a complicated relationship with several things — honesty, my body, guilt, and I am riddled with anxiety. But if there’s one thing I love, it’s being in the midst of a crowded party. The person I was about to do it with is perhaps more impulsive than me, and more confident than me, and seemed to be a lot more experienced within the party drug realm than me. This always happens when I am seeing someone more spontaneous than I, I briefly turn into a more reckless version of myself. I could have stopped smoking for weeks, but if a date is smoking a cigarette, God knows I will throw that progress out of the window and take a drag (or two), in some bid to prove to myself that I am more carefree than I may seem. I am constantly in a state of proving something to myself. So yes, come the following week, I was about to do a new drug with a new person because I guess I wanted to be impetuous like that. Everything was falling into place, I’d scoured the internet, read every molly-related post on Reddit, and spoken to a few of my friends who’d done it before in anticipation of this night. Everybody had only wonderful stories about their nights — the overwhelming sense of community, the fluidity of the world, the dancing, the sex, the movement. A friend told me not to watch Gaspar Noe’s Climax, a film about a group of dancers experiencing some collective drug-induced psychosis in an abandoned building, quite possibly the worst thing I could put myself through before the big night but then I did watch the first twenty minutes of it just to see what it was like. I stopped myself preemptively in an act of conscious self-preservation.

So a few days later, I was out on the road in a park near the club, about to do strange drugs with a strange musician at 10 PM in Delhi in the dark. I must add here that the drugs were baby blue and Eastern European, supposedly ethnically Polish, had the words Twitch Live stamped onto them, and they were given to me by a most dear and depraved cousin of mine. This was a predicament my parents had probably prayed I’d never find myself in. Fast forward twenty minutes after the deed, and I found myself immobile in the bathroom. But not immobile in a scary way, I just felt like my limbs had no start or end, and I had no joints. I was feeling good at this point and decided to “surrender to the feeling,” as people say. I went out and danced, and everything felt like magic. Everything around me was constantly on the move, and there were lights everywhere. But then, at some point during these few minutes, the world suddenly got extraordinarily blurry and my visual field became oil painting-esque despite the fact that I was wearing my glasses. This was difficult for me. Nobody told me that my visual perception would be altered. I didn’t like the new feelings because it didn’t correspond with the feelings I had read about online, and I thought I was the resident expert on the drug with my extensive research. At some point then, I lost an hour of my memory, and I have no understanding of anything I said or did in that duration of time. Everything I said was unbeknownst to me, and the narrative was pieced together from the stories of my friends who were so very kind to me and took care of me the whole time. Each story felt worse than the previous one. I had become exceedingly honest, much to my detriment. I have no photographic or videographic evidence of anything that happened, but I do have something from my notes app that I had written as some reminder to myself shortly after:

wanted to stay true to what i wanted to write..

I have always been suspicious of the people who do a lot of drugs and claim they have found the meaning of life or have seen God. There is a supposed link between honesty and substances; they should elicit some underlying great truth from the individual. These people are ones my friend from university has so affectionately labelled “the vibration-bros”, you know, the kind of people who smoke too much weed and are convinced of several scientific untruths. The rich people who go on ayahuasca retreats and quit their jobs to “travel” and actually steal indigenous land and culture, the people who do shrooms before making any big decisions, the ego-death guys who are convinced there’s cancerous radiation in 5G, and the like. Partly because every time I have done some drug, it has felt incredibly transformative and spiritual in the moment, but also deeply unserious and trite when I look back on anything I have written under the influence. I feel a certain kind of shame to look to a drug for answers because of some belief I have that I possess all the answers inside me already, so why would I need another foreign thing to save me? This doesn’t mean I don’t smoke the occasional weed or do the occasional drug, but every time I get high and have a thought, the threat of a vibration-bro future looms large upon me. I have seen the brightest minds of our generation turn into vibration-bros. It could happen to me too. I like to think I am a principled woman, but I am an extremely susceptible individual, in reality. But like I said before, I want to be changed and my twenties are for doing new things, so I was incredibly positive about this night. I did seem to have some crazy realization that I want to write things, and it was revealed to me in several ways — first from this note I left to myself, and second also from my friend who told me that I very embarrassingly announced to a bunch of strangers at the club that I wanted to be a writer someday. I don’t know, maybe there is some truth to the vibration-bros and their drug-induced epiphanies. People say you either die a hero or live long enough to become what you swore to never become, or something along those lines. I don’t know. Most of all, my night was an experiment in curiosity, to see what matters affect me the most in times of extreme inebriation, seeing that it is such a vulnerable and truthful time and it comes as no surprise to me that the big Things plaguing my mind were: my writing and potential career in the field, my romantic and sexual life and this is maybe a bit random but my concern about my stress-induced hairfall that the dermatologist diagnosed me with last year. I have lately been obsessed with these lord-of-the-flies type of narratives and this whole idea that we are at our most authentic and honest selves when caught in a crisis situation. This could be the first of many personal quests in the future where I put myself through potentially dangerous situations to see what would happen, see what I learn. This could be a possibly self-destructive endeavour of mine but also a very necessary one, I believe. I am of course an anxious person by nature but somewhere deep, deep inside I think I have some unfounded confidence that it will all be okay in the end because I have people I love and people who love me. And it will. I think. Whenever people ask me those “Which one of us would survive in an apocalypse?” questions, nobody believes me when I rank myself last person to make it out alive because apparently I don’t really run, have any physical strength, or any survival skills. People have told me that the lack of wifi alone would kill me in an hour, but I have faith in my ability to persist.

After an uber ride home that my friends again so sweetly accompanied us on, the musician and I had so much energy still left in us, and I was quite excited to see what the night would bring. I don’t know how to describe them yet. Everything I write seems to resemble that one controversial tumblr post that Halsey wrote about Matty Healy where she describes him repeatedly as a messiah, a visionary, a prodigy, a prophet and other things of that sort of divine nature. The world has deemed her writing to be painfully tumblr-y and corny but I beg to differ. I think it’s earnest and sincere and precisely everything one should say about dating a British guy who writes edgy contrarian music and has a drug problem.

I have a great appreciation for the arts and I have spent my whole life failing at music, I have never had the dedication to learn more than a few guitar chords and then there’s also the time I couldn’t do a solo in the school choir in like fifth grade and I was relegated to being a choir voice. And we all know what having a choir voice means; it means you suck and they will keep you there in the choir in hope that your voice will be lost in the crowd, overshadowed by more talented sopranos and tenors. I have since gotten over it, and I don’t think having a choir voice is bad anymore. It’s nice to sing anyway. It’s nice when there are mismatched voices in a chorus and some out-of-tune sounds are emanating from the group. It’s why I like going to church now and again. Any group singing event makes me feral with excitement. If a choir needs a person, you best believe I will be signing up fervently. And every karaoke I do has soul and heart and grit, which we all know are totally more important than the conventions of talent anyway. So yes, I have always been fascinated by music and anybody who understands it and excels at it is very remarkable and attractive to me. I am always in awe of people who are constantly expanding their artistic world. I am the biggest romantic and idealist and I think it’s the only way to live. I cannot fathom a cynical existence personally, when there are people just doing cool things around me. I must be one lucky girl if every single person I encounter in my life is literally the most talented artist I know. There’s people making new music everyday, creating permutations and combinations of sounds that have never been created before, and it is always an honour to be in the presence of just people who want more. I would like to write a song at some point in my life, among the many things I want to write. So I am at this musician’s house, and they are telling me about their history with music and their childhood and their earliest guitar memories and their forays into producing newer and exciting kinds of sounds, and I am so ecstatic to be listening to it all. They’re playing me an early version of a song they made and it’s so good I’m losing my mind. And when musicians pick you to show them an early demo of something they’re working on (and they actually know what they’re doing) it’s always like omg im getting a preview of the next big thing right now wtf. And they’re always apologizing and saying some shit like “yeah this isn’t so good yet it hasn’t been mixed or mastered yet but it actually sounds so fucking insanely good already.

The same friend who created the vibration-bro subgenre of annoying people is also perhaps the biggest Adorno enthusiast I know and he keeps talking to us about Adorno’s imagined future in communism where art must be abolished but only insofar as that we can all do things that bring us artistic and spiritual satisfaction through the day, and our lives would automatically become fulfilling, very much drawing from that Marx quote from The German Ideology of being able to fish in the morning, hunt in the afternoon, criticize in the evening etc. I love spending time with people with big dreams because, for a second, it reinforces my belief that there is a lot to live for in this world. I had told them at some point that it was sweet that they have so many visions for the future and things to accomplish, and I desperately and vehemently endorse that way of existence. Getting to know so much about somebody for the first time in the course of a single night is a wonderfully intimate thing that I love to do, and it’s just so great when it naturally happens on a date. Substances aside, I am known to be an overly inquisitive date. I am a chronic question-asker. I won't stop till I know everything. There was a whole world of stuff I was learning about and I love talking to people; it is my sole purpose in life, and the affect and kinship that is created by this drug was something I had never experienced before. Having no inhibitions whatsoever made me way more forthright and blunt than I perhaps should have been on an early date but I think it’s doing us good. I hope. It was all new and unknown to me. Even kissing made me feel like a baby seeing the world for the first time. Debauchery I got up to at the club aside, I had a sweet and memorable night. I was safe and cared for through my trip, and I am terribly apologetic to everybody who took care of me and also eternally grateful to them for doing so. Though my behaviours were severely out-of-pocket, it was conveyed to me that I was happy, which is the emotion I would like to have felt. I’d written it down in my notes app too. It is indeed a truth universally acknowledged that the most eventful nights and best stories are the ones you learn about in the morning through second-person narratives, ominous bruises, and many, many fortunate and unfortunate transgressions.