The Same Way

I wanted to see how micro-dosing psybicilin would affect my writing. A neighbour I met here in Maui offered a concoction of five different mushrooms to send me on my journey. Golden Teacher being the psybicilin, and the rest with other benefits I can’t remember now. Here’s where it took me. Or rather, how.

You feel pregnant walking along the weaving roads of Maui. The thickness of the air ripe like candy. Each step on the path feels heavy. Important. Prehistoric.

Hawaii is exceptional. It’s ancient balance of life breeds out the bad parts.

The bamboo overhead bends and rattles against each other like a wooden torture chamber. Peering over the road. Threatening to tip down with each gaping creak. It sounds almost metallic in its intent like a baby ghost taunting you from a haunted crib on the wild ceiling.

A thousand different birds sing around my head like a eulogy as I hand-pick breakfast from the fruit trees out front. Roosters and their black feathers shined like mirrors. Hen in company form an invisible ring with their curious fat bodies safely enclosing the grounds.

This. Is. Skynet.

In the morning an adjacent dirt road would invite my pretty bride and I for a walk. Upon it we came to a small bridge that quietly overlooks a subtle but persistent creek.

At the edge of the rippled water, a grey rooster neurotically pecks away at a severed head of what looks like a big-mouthed brown boar. Its rib cage shipwrecked downstream and surrounded by thick radiating black flies, diverting my attention like the light from a fired flare gun in a deserted island story.

We were following the sun when I noticed the carcass of another hairy pig covered in mud with larva birthing at its orifices and two more dead animals in old pet-food bags further down the road. The rest of the walk was punctuated with the appearance of some car parts, an engine and a cooler left to rust away roadside at a nameless neighbour’s expense.

The castaways.

There was often a sudden ping, crash or snap sound while walking through the jungle roads under trees and vines each with their own personal history. A thousand barters, murders, feasts, deaths and births happened around our cars, shops and cement on any given night as we slept. Adapting around our human intent.

Back to the start.

A few days later, the once thick and moist pig carcass is now a pile of bones cleaned white. Hollowed out skull to give life to the maggots-soon-butterflies that’ll kiss our toes in the afternoon.

It all shifts and grows around us. We impede on it when we forget that. Which is often enough.

We slept until light that night. Woke up and did it again and it was all just the same way as it was that first day. Just as it was for the ant, or the spider that will trap it. For the leaf that shades the vine for a face full of sun. The same way.

Part of a micro-dosing writing series. Follow this account to not miss the next entry.