I’m a drug dealer. Let me tell you what psychosis is like.

Psychosis is defined as a mental disorder characterized by a disconnection from reality. When people overdose and survive, they often go into psychosis. Doctors say that the drugs fucked up their heads so bad that they can’t understand reality anymore. I’m here to tell you what psychosis actually is. Psychosis is being more in touch with reality than you should be. You probably think I’m a stoner trying to convince you that getting high will help you find enlightenment. Well that isn’t me; psychosis may be getting more in touch with reality but you don’t want to. I say this through experience. Let me tell you my story.

My life had always been one of mediocrity. I would run you through all the events of my life up till this point but that would, quite frankly, be very boring so I’ll just tell you the parts relevant to where I find myself now.

I started dealing drugs in my second year of university. It wasn’t something that began suddenly or even deliberately. I didn’t have anything going for me, barely passed my classes and mostly sat with my roomies, smoking weed and playing video games all day until night rolled round and we hit the hardest party we could find. I did have a job for some side income but my parents managed most of my expenses, affording me my directionless lifestyle. You see, it began innocently with a few baggies of weed here and there, weed became tabs of ecstasy, ecstasy became opiates. This eventually snowballed; I ended up ‘the guy’ for any drug you could fathom. I sold everything, you name it meth, coke, shrooms, I had it. It wasn’t even a solo operation anymore. I had boys running to suppliers and customers for me on the daily. I’d gone from loaning friends a few weed baggies to running a little supply chain transporting thousands of dollars in drugs weekly.

The news came like a shotgun blast, the trauma was explosive, indescribably sorrowful. It broke me down. Leaving me with an emptiness that would never leave. My parents were dead. They were driving down the freeway when an 18-wheeler lost control in the opposite lane, pummeling them into oblivion. They told me their deaths were quick, as if that fixed anything, as if it would make me any less broken.

I had constantly evaded their suspicions and concerns with elaborate plots and convenient excuses. They knew something was wrong, they knew I’d turned into something they hadn’t raised. They were there for me and would always have been, regardless of what I did. They were the only ones who cared for me. If I was to die in that instant no one would care. I had no friends nor family, only accomplices and whores. The void I left now would be one so easily replaceable that it would be practically non-existent.

I didn’t care anymore. I wanted to feel something, anything to take away from the sorrow that I knew would torment me for the rest of my life, who even cared if I died right there. These thoughts ran through my head as I eyed the jug of pre-processed LSD on the countertop. It was enough for a couple hundred doses of LSD at the very least, each dose was meant to trigger vivid hallucinations for 8-12 hours. Indifferent to all this, I picked up he jug and swallowed all the tasteless fluid in one swift gulp.

The trip’s beginning was as usual, though quite short. In the first hour after the LSD I had a few minor auditory and visual hallucinations. Little green men hopped around the room as the walls morphed into different shapes and colors before becoming free as a river and flowing around the room drowning the little green men. Nothing out of the ordinary.

It was around an hour after I chugged the LSD that the trip began to kick in in full force. It began normally as the hallucinations grew more vivid and despite the surrealistic nature of everything I saw I was at peace, an effect of the drug. Bizarre spirals opened up on each surface and protruded out gently and calmly as if they had sentience of their own. My bed slowly passed through a wall and came out from the wall opposite and the windows that previously let me look over a small backyard behind which a dense forest lay now showed a scene out of an animated film as the sun’s blistering hate gave each leaf a frown on their tiny faces, each’s eyes were staring at me, somehow, dead in the eye. The last thought I remember having then was “I am clearly high out of my goddamn mind right now” after which I don’t remember much more of the hallucinations. I do remember what came after.

The doctors say that that’s when the psychosis kicked in, that’s when the drugs had left my mind in a state where it had deviated from normality and I had lost connection with reality and had gone into psychosis. But this was no psychosis. My trip had opened up a window into something beyond the veil behind which our existence lies. I cannot describe it to you for my mind cannot understand what it saw. I can put it in one way that might help you out of this pit of vagueness I’ve left you in. Imagine that six blind men enter a room and there’s an elephant in that room. These blind men each grab a part of the elephant, one the ear, one the tail, one the trunk, and so on. Each of them is trying to understand a small part of something much greater. Well the elephant is the morbid, empty and horrifying nature of existence. Humanity is like one of those blind men, trying to comprehend something much bigger through its fancy theories of the universe. The drugs somehow let me walk into that room with my eyes open and I saw the entire goddamn elephant. The entirety of reality and how it works, in this unfiltered, wicked state. The world cracked in half and for an excruciating, dreadful instant, I was aware of the entirety of the horrors that lie in the void we are veiled from. It was too much for my mind to take, I blacked out only to wake up in a mental asylum weeks later.

Now here I am, alone and aware in this small, inconsequential corner of this institute of the mentally deranged. They tell me I’ve permanently damaged my brain and put myself in a state of eternal psychosis. Their fancy machines may be able to see my neurons and synapses however they cannot fathom to understand the spectrally macabre images and sounds in my head. I do not know if I can even call them images or sounds because these things are so much more. It’s as if my senses have been elevated to a grotesque plane of perceptibility beyond everyone else yet so far below the plane where this morbidity can be understood to any extent, if there is one. I have witnessed and continue to witness something I should not and cannot comprehend. I have been made aware of a hint of the presence of an evil much older, much greater and much more terrifying than the eeriest, most morbidly detached darkness that a human mind could ever fathom. I am going to kill myself the first chance I get. I wish to return to the sweet embrace of oblivion where I am not tormented by this monstrosity of awareness towards something I can barely comprehend, where there is no wish left to be fulfilled. Where we were before we were born and where we will be after; it is meaningless to whine about it as oblivion is Elysium enough for me.

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This was my first take at writing horror and I hope you liked it. I chose to go with a mix of psychological and cosmic horror as those are the sub-genres of horror I'm most fond of. I would love any feedback you'd like to give so please do!