The Secret of Life

This guy I knew took thirty hits of acid one night. I had to babysit him for a few hours. During the course of his ordeal, I had to leave because he seemed to be getting violent and no one else was around.

His friends found him a few hours later, naked, hiding in a closet waiting to ambush them. He thought they had the Secret of Life. They had to restain him for a while. After this, he kept asking them, "What do I do now? What do I do now?"

He and I were decent friends up until that night. He remembered me leaving him in the midst of a bad trip. He never quite spoke to me again.

Whatever happened between the time I left and the time his friends found him was rather profound. I can only imagine what time dialation and hallucination is like when you've been left in the dark for a couple of hours. Somewhere in that gap between me and them, he saw what we all fear. He came to know a fact that none of us wants to know, because on the surface it seems so empty and tragic we can't accept it.

Accepting a fact such as this is easy compared to accepting the Secret of Life, even though it would seem easy enough if I put the thought out there.