Paris

Sitting here with Akiko, telling her about Athens, about growing up between worlds, she asks the obvious question:

“So when did you first realize reality was bigger than what you'd been taught?”

And I have to go back further. Before Mexico. Before Tulane. Before DMT in New Orleans.

I have to go back to Paris. And Atalanti. And that night on the beach when the boundaries dissolved and I understood, for the first time, that consciousness was more than just the thing happening inside my skull.

I was seventeen.

Before the scene, a poem. It sits at the head of the Paris pages in my journal, and I read it to Akiko as it stands. The last line is the thing the beach proved first, and the thing the rest of this is trying to prove again.

MY FIRST TRIP

To take a leap of faith is
To embrace the unknown
Holding true to the balance of knowing that
The limited existence cannot know the infinities of this world
Only feel

That is when and why
The muse guides the instinctual warrior dance
The muse who appears only when one surrenders to the power of fluidity
Abandoning the mind

Sustained through gratitude, sacrifice, and worship
Crippled by doubt, fear, and attachment
Raising the invisible walls
Emphasizing ones separateness
Emerging ego,
Tricking us into unbelieving the inescapable truth
That all is one: love

It was summer 1995. I'd just finished my junior year at the American Community School in Athens.

I was packed and barely able to sleep. The Chunnel had just opened and driving from England to France with Christopher seemed too tempting to resist, but I was flying from Athens to Paris and wouldn’t have that pleasure. Christopher, my childhood friend, had just graduated from Eton. He was one of the few Greeks I knew who were in boarding schools in England. Christopher and his crew were treating themselves to a week in Paris, driving through the luxurious new Chunnel in their M3 convertible BMW. Our terrific plan consisted of us meeting below the Eiffel Tower; it seemed rational at the time.

Simple plan. Terrible execution.

Because when you tell teenagers to meet below the Eiffel Tower, you forget that the Eiffel Tower is fucking massive and there's a whole park around it and below could mean anywhere.

The summer breeze blew a newspaper over my bag, which was placed neatly next to a bench in the park. Le Monde, the world was at my feet, waiting for me to pick it up, follow my quest. I had been waiting for a few hours now; my flight had gotten in earlier than I had expected, and it seemed like a good opportunity to practice my French, actually using this language I had been forced to learn painstakingly at school. I had probably never used it on my own before, for my own benefit and not for a grade or external approval. Fumbling through the few pages of Le Monde, pretending to be French and sophisticated, I sensed the presence of someone else; it almost startled me. Looking up I saw these two blue eyes radiating under a brown beret. Her blond hair drifted in the gentle wind. Do you have a light? she asked, and I almost couldn’t respond. I had a light. My friends showed up a few hours later; in the meantime I enjoyed the company and got to know this blue-eyed nymphet.

Her name was Atalanti.

Atalanti was from Germany and had been inter-railing through Europe for the past month with two of her friends; she was 16, only a few months younger than me. We all went out that night, her friends and mine. The trip was only going to last a week, and then I had to go back to Greece and spend the rest of the summer with my parents. I had saved up the money for the trip working in a dairy factory, unloading trucks. It seemed to be the most inappropriate thing for me to be doing, but my dad always said that I needed to see how the simple man lives, and what the value of money is. So those 5 days in Paris were appreciated deeply after spending two months on a factory loading dock. This all was now spawning into a relationship with Atalanti that lasted for over 2 years.

Christopher showed up eventually. So did Atalanti's friends. And we all ended up spending the week together, wandering through Paris like characters in a movie neither of us had seen yet.

For most of them, it was about seeing the Eiffel Tower, hitting clubs, getting drunk. Normal teenager stuff.

For me, it was escape. Distance from my parents, from Greece, from the feeling that I was suffocating in a life that wasn't mine.

By the time I flew back to Greece, Atalanti and I had exchanged addresses.

Real addresses. Physical mail. Because this was 1995 and email wasn't really a thing yet.

We wrote letters.

Our relationship was a long-distance one and came with all the benefits and drawbacks that such a relationship comes with. Email was not commonly used then, and most of our communication occurred the old-fashioned way, through ordinary mail. There is something paradoxical about the nature of this type of communication. It is isolating and unifying at the same time; the lack of fluctuating feedback allows one to fully immerse oneself in the mind and heart of another. This occurs in isolation from one’s environment and yet has the profound ability to transfer one to a very different place and time. Long letters of blossoming love floated across the European sky, in the cargo sections of mail planes, ink choreographed on compressed tree pulp, making our hearts flutter when the mailbox was full.

After our first encounter in Paris, she was heading to South Africa to participate in a student exchange program. She was to stay in Cape Town for six months, and soon our pieces of compressed tree pulp were zipping across the African sky.

In the spring of 1996, I invited her to visit me in Greece.

Almost a year had passed and we had only spent five days together; everything else between us had been woven together in words of romantic despair across two continents. She had spent some time in a small village and had been writing to me a lot about the Zulus. I had invited her to stay with me in Greece on her way back to Europe, an idea which had not been carefully thought out. Nonetheless, almost a year after our introduction in Paris and six months after Atalanti landed in Africa, I was picking her up in Greece.

To stay with me. To meet my family.

Except I didn't let her meet my family.

I borrowed a friend's house outside Athens, a place on the coast, quiet, private, and told my parents I was going camping with friends.

Sitting here now, trying to tell this to Akiko, I know how it sounds. She keeps typing. So here it is the way I wrote it down, close to the night, before I had learned to make it smaller.

The dry heat made it so pleasant to drive with the windows open, but there always was a conflict between the music and the wind. The signal-to-noise ratio was dangerously low and the only solution meant blaring music to such an extent that slowing down would require volume adjustment to prevent deafness and public humiliation. She sat next to me holding my right hand. I loosely slipped out of her grip and changed gears. It was kind of odd having her next to me after all this time; it was as if her letters were more real than she was, and now, looking at those blue eyes, I wished they were words on paper rather than gelatin membranes radiating soul juice. I was taking her to a friend’s house a few hours outside Athens. It would be calm and private there, where we could share some time together away from the turbulence of my home.

I had not seen her for so long, and I honestly knew her very little; the essence of our communication transcended our dis-ease.

The spring had brought many changes. My interests had shifted to the mind, and how it functioned had begun to capture and slowly focus my entire attention. My every thought seemed to be filtered through another layer, which I was constantly analyzing, watching from a distance. Atalanti and I had met prior to this change; although my writing reflected it, I was unsure whether or not she was aware of it. During several rainy nights my friends and I had been conducting rituals, experimenting with LSD, and many strange things had happened. Completely overwhelmed by the vastness of these experiences, we seemed to be eager to ride the bucking bull, craving this excitement.

Our minds were unleashed and rampaged into the sea of fluctuating moments, chaotically choreographed: we were seeking to merge with the unknown, and experience it. The most vivid and intense experiences for me were those when we were in close proximity with each other; we seemed to fuse, our minds, our thoughts mirrored in each other. Telepathy, for lack of a better word, became the theme of our secret rituals. Its possibility had jolted me into trivializing ordinary reality. Everything seemed monotonous, pointless and shallow. It lacked a vibrancy, a richness in color and texture; its essence was less evident; it was musky and seemed to smother every moment, every thought. Clarity pierced the murky normality in these moments of direct experience; their flamboyant association to the mystical intrigued me. I was uncomfortable facing Atalanti with these new thoughts, fearing that they would scare her away. We unpacked the car and took our luggage to where we were going to sleep.

Sitting in the living room, we made some tea, and my friend Christos and I shared a trip. Atalanti did not join us, understandably so. She had just gotten back to Europe after spending six months in South Africa, and now she found herself in a strange house with a boy she had only been conversing with through letters for the past year. As the night unfolded, our conversation drifted into an ambient and relaxing atmosphere. Christos and I had started to take off. The tingling in my brain made me restless, and I could see Atalanti retire into a corner with her notebook. She sat quietly jotting down notes and sketches, peeking over the top of her book every once in a while so as not to lose touch with what was going on.

The awkward silence in the room broke as I chased Christos around the fireplace in the center of the lounge. I had been trying to connect with him for some time, but whenever I got close enough to touch him, he began giggling irresistibly and ran away. This frustrated me further; we had dropped acid several times before and he knew that after the initial tickling sensation, everything would be fine. Nonetheless, he skittered away like a little child. The bubble on top of my head had started to expand, I could see it as a visual manifestation of my mental state. Can’t you see the power? Don’t you realize what we can do here? Look at what just happened! He rolled on the floor laughing uncontrollably, and that infuriated me even further. I had taken the experience really seriously, and adrenaline was pumping through me.

As the dimly lit room flickered in the candlelight, Atalanti grabbed my arm. My entire body was hypnotized; my initial desire was to continue scolding Christos, but her powers had enchanted me, and my legs started to move as I followed her out of the house and down to the beach.

We sat ourselves in the sand several meters from the sea’s shore. Sitting on our sides, we placed our foreheads on each other’s shoulders and hugged each other with our free arm. She whispered into my ear, and her words slowly penetrated into my mind. It was as if the voice was coming from inside me. She had merged with some female archetype, some mother goddess, and it sounded as if she was channeling the words from some other realm. Our bodies began to melt into each other. Every part of our skin that touched the other slowly seemed to dissolve. Our breaths were synchronized; each inhale was matched by the other’s exhale, the deeper the breath, the deeper the connection was reinforced. Every moment was clearly defined by a distinct flavor, a particular slice from the spectrum of possible colors. Each moment distinguished from the next as if the borders of the rainbow stripes were defined by a thought which manifested in the form of a question. A grand lesson spilled out of her, and I would ask, and she would answer before the question had been completed. Visual representations of her deepest and most defining abstract characteristics were offered to me with no mediation; I was connected to her in the most profound way.

Delicately her words navigated me through her thoughts. Our breathing had become deeper and more intense, our connection stronger and more vivid. A subtle energy current filled our bodies and transcended our shell of a skin merging with the other’s field. A deep warm feeling pumped through our bodies; synchronized by the breathing, it intensified exponentially, reaching an orgasmic climax. I could feel the inside of her skin as if the border of where our skin touched had dissolved and she was an extension of me. I could not tell where my body ended and hers began; we were one.

In us, we could see this abstract shape forming clearer with each breath, shaped like a snowflake in three dimensions rather than its usual flat appearance. There were two distinct sides, each with its own color, one side yellow and the other red, and in the center of the Rorschach 3D snowflake, the two colors twirled into the most beautiful orange. As the curdling colors wrestled with each other, the warmth became visible. The figure resonated with her voice, and every last detail of the pulsating 3D snowflake was the crystallization of our union. It was the visualization of the unity of our psyches.

In the ecstatic panic of the climax, I asked her desperately…. What is this? What is it? After a gentle pause, she calmly and surely replied in another voice from another world: This is love! At that moment I felt my entire life as fragmented, moments of infinite time mixed with hers, and whipped in a supersonic blender. Two lives flashing within each other, instantaneous but it also could have lasted an eternity.

Just as the realization sank in, Christos touched me with the tip of a freshly lit cigarette, ripping me out of the trance I was in. Atalanti’s calm face hovered in front of me, and bid me not to lose it. I sat and watched the sea, which had changed from where it was supposed to be. The tide had risen, and we were submerged up to our waists; I had not noticed it while we were connected. The full moon shone above us and its light outshone the desperate twinkling stars that tried to shine through the pale black sky. I never knew one could observe the tide in such a dramatic shift in Greece. I never thought the Mediterranean got pulled by her gravitational field, the body of water was too small. I had no idea how long we were there; it could have been 20 minutes, it could have been several weeks, I could not tell. It did not matter though, and so I got up, wet and slightly chilled, bewildered, dripping, and still tripping, and we walked back to the house.

I was scared of her. I felt that what I had just experienced was some rabid hallucination, which she was not a part of. I was so unsure of the validity of the experience, which was so overwhelming that my mind could not process the information, yet my body and my memory told me that it was real. In fact, it was more than real. It was designed with such elaborate harmony and intricate chaotic proportion that it did not resemble this world. It was from the realm of perfection, Eden perhaps.

Everything I had been told till that day had not prepared me for the glimpse into the abyss of the infinity’s union with individuality. I slept alone that night, afraid even to replay the fresh memories. The morning came quicker than usual. I brushed my teeth in a hurry so as to get out of the room and avoid her, the girl who had put a spell on me last night. She had toyed with my emotions and manipulated my thoughts. She had spent some time with the Zulus, I remembered, and immediately feared she might be a witch. Paranoia and obsessive avoidance of her made most of the morning miserable. I finally got the courage to talk to her for the first time at lunch. She sat there with the same look she had the night before, elegantly calm, radiating sureness and grace. She was not smiling, but her face was relaxed, concerned but not annoyed.

“What happened last night? What did you experience?”

“I was there with you,” she said. “I saw what you saw.”

“What did you see?”

She proceeded to recount the night exactly as I remembered it to have happened. She felt everything I had felt and described it to me with the same words I would have used to describe it. As I realized what had happened, my inhibitions melted away. I immersed myself in a pool of bubbling comfort supplied by a radiance that poured out of her body. I told her I thought we should just do what we had done last night every day, all day, and if I could achieve that without drugs we should move to a deserted island and just do that. She said we could try whenever we wanted and we did. It was never as intense with Atalanti, but there were times when we definitely reached significant depths of union.

Akiko stops typing, looks up.

“That's intense for a seventeen-year-old,” she says.

“Yeah. It fucked me up in the best possible way.”

“Did it scare you?”

“Terrified me. Still does, kind of. Because once you've seen behind the veil, you can't unsee it. And you spend the rest of your life trying to integrate it. Trying to function in the default world while knowing it's not the whole story.”

But you wouldn't take it back.

Not for anything.

Sitting here now with Akiko, six years later, after everything that's happened, after more LSD, after DMT, after ayahuasca in Peru, after all of it, I can trace everything back to that night.

Eventually she went back to Germany. I went to America for college. We wrote letters for another year and then drifted apart, the way teenage relationships do.

But there's another part of that story. The part that sealed my fate in Greece.

I was back in Athens. Applying to colleges in America.

My friends and I were still curious about altered states. We'd heard about Amsterdam, about space cakes. More approachable.

And one night, I offered to make some.

I found a recipe online. Ground up enough hash to make it work. Spent an afternoon carefully mixing it into brownies.

I told everyone what they were. “These have cannabis in them. It's going to be intense. Don't eat them unless you're ready.”

Everyone said they were ready.

Looking back now, none of us had any idea what we were getting into. For most of them, it was their first time trying anything like this. And edibles, space cakes, they hit differently than smoking. Slower. Heavier. Harder to control.

We ate them together. Waited. Laughed nervously.

And then, about an hour in, it hit. Hard.

For me, it was manageable. I knew how to breathe through it, how to let go rather than fight.

But for my friends, kids who'd maybe smoked weed once or twice, who'd never really been high high, it was overwhelming.

Paranoia. Panic. That awful cannabis spiral where your thoughts loop and you're convinced something terrible is happening.

One friend thought his heart was going to explode. Another was convinced he was dying. A third just sat in the corner, too terrified to speak.

I tried to calm everyone down. “You're okay. It's just the weed. You'll be fine in a few hours. Nobody's dying.”

But when you're that far gone, words don't help. They were just... lost.

The next day, I got the calls.

Parents had found out. And my friends, scared, probably still shaken, told their parents they hadn't known what was in the brownies. That I'd given them to everyone without saying what they were.

It wasn't true. But I get why they said it.

They were seventeen. Their parents were furious. And it's easier to say I didn't know than I chose to eat hash brownies and couldn't handle it.

They weren't trying to destroy me. They were just trying to protect themselves.

Sitting here with Akiko, I can see her frowning.

“But you told them,” she says. “They knew.”

“Yeah. But they were kids. We all were. And they panicked. I don't blame them for it anymore. It was too intense for a first experience. I should have given them way less. Or not done it at all.”

“Still. You took the fall.”

“I did. And honestly? It was what needed to happen.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean... I'd already been feeling like I didn't belong in Greece. Like I was suffocating there. This gave me the push I needed.”

After that, things changed. Not dramatically. But subtly.

Some parents didn't want their kids hanging out with me anymore. A few friends kept their distance. Nothing hostile, just... awkward. Like I'd become the kid who couldn't be trusted.

And it confirmed what I'd already been feeling: I was different. I wanted different things. I asked different questions. And Greek society, conservative, concerned with appearances, protective of its children, wasn't going to let me explore those questions.

I needed to leave.

And instead of resenting it, I turned it into fuel.

“So you're saying they actually helped you,” Akiko says.

“Yeah. I mean, it sucked at the time. I felt misunderstood. Like nobody got what I was trying to do. But it made leaving easier. It gave me permission to walk away without guilt.”

“Lemons into lemonade.”

“Exactly. If I'd still felt connected to that world, if I'd still had that friend group, maybe I would have stayed.”

“But you didn't.”

“But I didn't. I applied to Tulane. Got accepted. Left for New Orleans. And everything that happened after, all of it, started with that choice.”

She nods, types for a moment. Then stops.

“Do you still talk to any of them?”

“No. We drifted apart. But I don't have any hard feelings. We were all just kids trying to figure shit out. They made the choice that felt safe. I made the choice that felt true. And that's okay.”

I was sixteen, seventeen, and after my parents caught me with brownies, and the whole story, they forced me to go to a shrink several times a week for two years. At the end of the two years he was supposed to tell them that I was never gonna do drugs again, and that it was safe to send me to college in America. The guy was old school psychoanalysis style, where they say nothing, and maybe a question here and there. So literally, in two years the guy said nothing to me.

And one day he opens his mouth, and this is what he says to me.

“Do you want me to fuck you?”

“I'm so sorry. No, that's horrible,” Akiko says.

“But there was a point to it.”

“Oh, he wasn't saying, ‘can I fuck you?’”

“No, no, no.”

“That's like a breach.”

“No. He was making a point. It's very interesting. It had nothing sexual.”

“No, he was asking you if that's how you related,” Akiko says.

“That is what I was saying. It was the same tone of my own thoughts: fall in love with me. And the boundaries that you seek with people. Certain people you shouldn't pour your soul out to. That's what he was saying. And the tone in which I was trying to say is love me, love me. And that was when I realized. I become this show it all to everyone, and hopefully someone will love me for what I am.”

“And so this, in some respect, is that. But it cannot be the stripper. You see what I'm saying? It has to be the ballerina. It has to be very graceful.”

Outside the window, the East Village hums. But in here, we're building the story. Excavating the moments that created the person sitting in this chair, dictating his life to a stranger who's become a friend.

Paris was the door opening.

Athens was the setup.

Akiko closes her laptop.

Next chapter is Cassie, right? The heartbreak?

Yeah. That's the wound that sent me on the journey.

From Paris to heartbreak to the Odyssey. That's the arc.

That's the arc.

She does not stand up yet.

“That is today,” she says. She names the hours.

The ad said a paid position. Fifteen dollars an hour. My words. I pay her and she counts it in front of me, fast, the way she types. Then she puts on her coat and says “Tuesday.”

I sit in the quiet for a while after she leaves.

Thinking about Atalanti. About that night. About being seventeen and having the boundaries dissolve and thinking: This is what they've been hiding from us. This is what religion used to point toward before it got institutionalized. This is why shamans exist. This is why people dance. This is what it's all about.

And knowing, even then, even at seventeen, that I'd spend the rest of my life trying to get back there.

Not to that specific experience. But to that state. That openness. That dissolution of boundaries.

That's what the journey was for.

That's what all of this is for.

Finding your way back to unity while still being able to function as an individual.

The Greeks had names for the two sides of the snowflake. Dionysus, the god of wine and intoxication and intuition, the part of us poetry comes from. Apollo, reason, logic, order, the sun god who made sure the sun rose where it should. Two gods, and both of them honored, once.

And we gave way to science and mathematics, and ultimately, anything that couldn't be measured or seen did not exist. And slowly, slowly we rub and disinfect the world of that magic, of that Dionysian funk.

And as a result of that, we no longer see the mountain as this entity that provides life for thousands of species, and protects ecosystems and patterns of weather, in a mystical, almost deified way. But we see the mountain as a pile of rocks, and a forest as a bunch of wood to be exploited.

Yellow and red twirling into orange. Two colors in one shape, and neither of them winning. That is what I had seen on the beach, before I had the names. The names came later. The shape came first.

That's the practice.

That's the path.

And it all started in Paris, with a girl under the Eiffel Tower asking if I had a light.

I did.

And she showed me the fire.