Learning experience

October 28, 2015

My friend and I were in his room. We had come home from the Italian Festival downtown and were excited to try some of the salvia I had brought over. I started. I took several nice big hits, packed another bowl of it and did it again.

The effects came on pretty quickly but were generally mild. I then smoked some grass while my friend smoked his portion of the salvia. He hit it a few times then passed it to me and I hit it until it was beat. I looked up and he was walking on top of his recliner saying he was following a line that he swore was there. I got up and saw no line therefore sat back down, laughing uncontrollably. I fell into a deep stare at his cat laying on the bed. It morphed into several different illusions while my friend was rambling on about men who live in the forest and worship owls in San Francisco. I had no clue what he was talking about and laughed harder than I had ever done before. We were both very stoned and tripping out of our minds on the salvia. It was an absolute beautiful experience. I felt enticed to feel all of the walls in the house and understand their resonance while trying to comprehend the world around me. We had then decide to take our experience out into the open. Going outside lifted the euphoria to another level. The breeze was the most refreshing it’s ever been. The sun was warm and the air was clean. We went to the water by his house, it was a river. We ran into some of my friends former acquaintances and small talked our way out of awkward high conversation.

We came under the bridge that went over the river. It had an understructure that led to the loss of my friend’s conception of reality. He decide that he would be able to jump from the platform that was seven feet high over an eight foot gap and grab onto the ledge of the bridge so that he could climb onto the understructure. He asked me to do it. I said no way man that is never going to work! But he was persistent. He decide that in order to get me on the same page as to how easy this was going to be, he would first have to demonstrate. So here’s my friend climbing onto the platform of the bridges huge sign getting ready to make a leap of death. I was lost. Should I tell him not to? I didn’t know what to do. He claimed to have done it plenty of times, but this time I thought, your tripping on salvia and smoked fair amounts of other “herbal extremities.” I looked over as I stood next to the concrete platform and saw a dead pigeon with it’s wing ripped off. Then I looked up and he jumped, grabbed onto the ledge of the bottom of the bridge, and slipped. Big time. He came down faster than I can describe. His shoulder blades hit first after enduring the fifteen foot drop. After the shoulders the head snapped back and smacked the ground with enough force to make me cringe. I ran over to him as he hadn’t moved after the hit. Nothing. I thought he was messing with me because that was his personality sometimes, but not this time. I shook him begging him to talk, to do anything. There was a dismembered pigeon feather laying next to his unconscious head that he kicked away. Panic mode set in big time. I was so shocked to have just witness something so real and utterly terrible. I was lost on salvia and right before my eyes my friend had just suffered what I could only hope to be anything short of death. I shook him some more, my mind racing, screaming at him to get up. Then a miracle. He came to and made some noise with his mouth. I kept asking if he was okay and a passerby heard me, pulled over on his bike, gave me a bottle of water and rode away. Talk about random!

It’s hard to recollect these especially dramatic, lightening fast occurrences, but according to what I can gather now it was the most frightening thing I have ever had to endure. He sat up, drank some of the water the mystery miracle man gave me, and talked some slow but reassuring sentences. I told him to take his time and stand up and we continued walking. His conversation was very normal and down to earth for a guy who had just made close friend with the unforgiving ground. So we walked slightly on until he had swore on his life that he was having psychic flashbacks. He was ranting about how everything all of a sudden just turned into one big memory that the previous night he had foreseen happening! He was absolutely sure he had obtained psychic abilities; then he began repeating himself. He had all of a sudden had no clue about where he was, what just happened, the time of day, the duration of the experience, nothing. He kept repeating over and over again the question of where he was and why. He asked why he was wearing brown, and if his hat was okay. I went over our entire days happenings and nothing stuck. Everything leaked out. He was in a loop of asking what had happened and why he was where he was. The kid was wacked. I thought it was just the salvia and waited for it to wear off while having to deal with the same question literally almost two hundred times. He couldn’t put anything together but remembered perfectly well every detail of his life. Events of the day made no sense to him and he forgot what he had asked very few seconds after just having asked it.

We made it back to his house. I was nervous as hell. I didn’t know what to do. This kid had just impaled his head on the rock solid ground, out of his mind on salvia and I was the only one there to help him do anything. His mom wouldn’t answer the phone and the time and dragged to an hour and a half with no signs of retreating delirium. I kept giving him water and then said we are going to the hospital right now. I drove him to the hospital where he was still making no sense almost two hours later and admitted him in the emergency room. His mother finally came and was more than grateful for my helping him. This was a serious concussion. The boy couldn’t remember anything. He was out. He went in to get a CT scan and that was the last I saw of him. This is the night of the occurrence that I’m writing this and I hope to god that he will be alright in the end and have no serious long term damage.

This is a lesson to all users of salvia: it’s great fun, but it is no joke. It is a very potent, mind altering substance that can put you over the edge in the wrong situations. I felt much more control over it than my friend did but that goes to show how much things like salvia can vary from person to person. Just because one person can handle it doesn’t mean another can. I have to admit this was one of the most frightening moments of my entire life. I didn’t know what to do. I was lost entirely. I panicked but brought my wits together enough to make the decision to bring him safely to the hospital. Thank God. Be careful out there guys, please.

by Zak