My brother told me once you take DMT you can taste it and smell it in everything. I'm not sure what that means, because I've never taken DMT, the drug that your brain supposedly produces just before death, expanding the horizons of your consciousness until the whole world is swallowed in the singularity that is your life. It is supposed to make you look in and in and in until you are looking back at yourself and it's just the two of you facing each other through whatever perfect metaphor your brain has constructed for the occasion and you believe it and identify with it because the one you are seeing looks, talks, feels and acts just like you. And you can feel her emotions as you watch her, your perspective fluttering between first person and third person, watching yourself watching yourself watching you. I believe there is a sliver of something caught inside each one of us golden strangers hitchhiking through the valley of shadows, a tiny slice of the fruit of life riding along in the hollow between the lungs and above the stomach, that spot that sends out a beam of light when it's too dark to see the streetlights. That pulse is beating with my footsteps, seeing with my vision, hijacking my nervous system from time to time so it can get where it's going. And I don't mind, because it doesn't ride for free. For the smell of sage it trades an insight about the interconnectedness of every concept I've ever learned in school or on the streets. For the warmth of my lover's arm around me as he drifts off to sleep it trades a heart swelling so tight it might burst through my sternum and swallow both of us, happily drowning in our handiwork. For the play of sunshine on the river it trades a song, sung small in the awful elegance of a slot canyon, small but echoing off the rippling walls until my voice is sixty feet taller than i am, ringing up to the endless blue in an attempt to pay back that hitcher for lodging itself in my life. For the taste of a quesadilla layered in jalapeno cheese and cucumbers and peppers, slathered in guacamole we just made together, half naked in the tiny kitchen, chopping vegetables and trying to find something we disagree on, for the taste of these things my hitchhiker trades the spaces in between pleasure and pain, the distance between the depths and the heights, the weight between joy and sorrow. For my five senses the hitchhiker trades one sense as deep and sprawling as the night sky inverted, opening in instead of out, each point of light composed of trillions of other points of light, galaxies within galaxies. And when two galaxies collide, stars explode, gravity collapses in on itself and a singularity is formed, spaghetifying time and taste and truth and skin cells until the stars are not just touching, now they occupy the same physical space and time together because those words no longer mean anything rational. When you held me in the kitchen and i started to cry it was because i realized at that precise moment in time I may as well have been holding myself. That moment will never come again, not in that way, but I will savor it in everything I put my lips to because my taste buds are still singing a wordless love song to that little golden hitchhiker, who doesn't ride for free. and you know, I don't know about DMT being an ultimate ingredient in everything, not unless it has a much more common name, a name often used recklessly, vaguely, dishonestly, a name used as a weapon, as a cage, as a slave, as a curse and also as a caress on our weary muscles and a soothing hand to ravaged skin. The name of this ingredient is love and I smell it everywhere, I see it in the grasses and the cattle and the sedimentary sandstone and the waves of the rock. I see it in smile lines and glittering glassy eyes and the do in balls of the trees we planted and in your sister's skin and in the kitchen sink and under the open sky. I feel it running in my blood when you look at me, I feel it in my bones holding my back straight, and I hear it in my hitchhiker's song. We trade love for love and sense for sense and we may not ride for free but the price is too sweet not to pay.
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