Creative writing is hard. It’s a reconstruction of reality, sprinkled with pixie dust. It’s a careful formula of believability and intrigue––real enough to imagine, imaginative enough to read. I have not mastered that art. When I write, I am not careful. I don’t take much interest in how things actually are, so I describe how they could be. I don’t like names, I don’t like places, I don’t like specifics. I’ll take imagery over plot, ideas over dialogue, and words over sentences. I don’t care much about my readers, so I leave the woodland path untrimmed.

When I write, I look down at the world. I see what I see, and I imagine what could fill the spaces in between. I like the vantage point of distance; it gives me autonomy from my own stories. I can paint a landscape without me in it. Even better, I can paint that landscape in twilight, with lines blurring and colors fused. Everything’s more interesting when it’s fractured and rearranged. However, I now find myself in an unusual position: writing about a night of lived imagination. A night when the line between fact and fiction was visible to me as a dotted trail on a dreamed-up highway. A night when I got high for the first time.

Being high is nothing like a landscape. It’s a splatter paint. The world threw its colors at me, and I threw mine right back. We soaked the canvas in everything that could not be seen.

 

I didn’t realize I was high, until the night air felt very far away. My head buzzed with energy––an engine revving up. I felt light, like my body full of swirling smoke and nothing else. My heart was quick, my skin tingled, and my eyes drifted. They were unsure of where to look.

I had taken many inhalations of the burning weed, eager to experience its joyride. Now, I was indeed on a road––cruising down a two-lane highway. The right lane was determined “reality”, where I had existed before the weed. In that right lane, I knew where I was. I was carrying the bong inside, I was leaving the sky behind, I was walking into a familiar room, and I was sitting on a warm bed. But suddenly, there were many more places to be. Everything around me loosened, revealing layers. Things spun in and out of themselves, showing me their possibilities. It was like donning a pair of 3D glasses in a movie theater––except, the images extended backwards, deepening. Just for a moment. The world’s first layer––the one I had presumed was singular––was now thin and unimportant, like a coat of paint. It crackled and warped under my new discovery. I knew I was high. But what did it matter? The world was offering itself to my imagination. There was so much beneath what I had previously seen. The world said: “I’ll show you my layers if you show me yours. Let’s dance.” So, I danced with the world.

I was intrigued by the left lane. The wheel kept tugging in that direction, begging me to release my grip on reality. For a while, I sat on that dotted line between left and right, drifting back and forth. Controlled but curious. I don’t play video games, but this is what I believe some virtual worlds must feel like: half feasible half fantastic, both parts equally real. Something inexplicable happens––you suddenly possess superpowers, you fall down a hole into another universe, the landscape dissolves into something else entirely––it’s all acceptable. After all, the realm is too exciting for you to question it. You keep pushing onward, validating this enhanced reality by participating in it. I liked that feeling. I enjoyed the authority of my own imagination, how seamlessly it was blurred with the unimagined. What existed in my head was just as real as what existed outside of it. For a writer, that is true empowerment. I felt that, if released on a keyboard, my fingers would type something extraordinary. Or nonsensical. Probably the latter.

As the night wore on, my resolve to stay right weakened. Letting go of the wheel, the car merged left. And my mind exploded. The world molded and morphed with my thoughts––rushing in and out of me. The left lane was not linear, it was webbed and spiraling. There were so many dimensions to explore, so many paths to take. The highway transformed into a series of exists, and I was no longer alone, but surrounded by many speeding cars. Except, the cars were all driven by me. They were my thoughts begging to be supercharged with fantasy. I hopped between them, taking exit after exit, losing all sense of direction.

The left lane was dangerous though; it didn’t have a safety wall. It stretched on forever. The further I drifted, the faster I went, and the dizzier I became. Things became frightening. As I lay in bed, trying to fall asleep, I kept trying to steer right, back to where I was. But I was too caught up in the traffic of my thoughts. So, I surrendered, begging sleep to find me. The world continued to spin inside my head. The layers of existence looked less and less like the things they represented. I got lost, I got confused. Worst of all, I could feel everything creeping into me––I was no longer part of a fantastical world, I was the fantastical world. I didn’t want to be. Eventually, though, I fell asleep.

When I awoke, everything was as it had always been. The world had one layer––on still, solid, familiar layer. Things did not beckon my mental exploration. They did not unravel. There was one version, and that version was reality. Furthermore, I was no longer on a two-lane highway, merging from right to left. My mind was calm. My thoughts distinctly separate from what lay outside of it. I was a passive observer of the world, not its dance partner. And I was grateful.

 

And here I am, writing. I just reconstructed my high experience into a landscape. Although now, it’s impossible to know what is real about that story and what I embellished. It is impossible to know what happened and what could have happened. Because it all happened. And none of it did. It was all inside my mind, and it was more real than anything outside of it.