I know this is crazy long, reading definitely optional! This is an experience produced by ingesting a good dose of mescaline and some nice LSD. The first account is my experience of the night's events, the second half my sister's account. This details an experience of a very bad trip on my sister's behalf and a possible case of serotonin syndrome. I urge anyone on SSRI's to proceed with definite caution when ingesting psychedelic cocktails, even if if previous experiences with psychedelics have all been largely fantastic and without issue. Stay safe y'all.


It had been a while since I’d had a deep psychedelic experience and it was the right time, set and setting with which to take the plunge. This was getting towards the end of a batch of synthetic mescaline hcl and some LSD tabs. It isn’t the most potent acid I’ve had by a long shot but it is really nice and clean...it ain’t all about the potency I have learned.
Three of us would be tripping...me, my sister and one of my best and longest known friends. I have known this guy since the first year of secondary school and we began our pioneer psychedelic experimentation at the same time while at university in London together. This is someone I have a great deal of trust in, he’s a great guy and highly intelligent and empathic. I hadn’t seen him in a long time, and he was free of his rather controlling girlfriend which was a big plus, so he could just be himself. He is also good friends with my sister, and her first mushroom trip was with the two of us, a good few years ago now, and it had been a very special night for us all. My sister is less experienced than us but is by no means inexperienced. She shared an interest with us in psychedelics, and it was on an LSD trip with her then fiancé that made her realise she wasn’t happy. She thought the feelings were induced by the drug and would pass, but they didn’t, it seemed things came into the light she needed to be made aware of. Skip forward to now and we are living together and both working at or going to the same university and have our own flat we’ve made our own space, life is good.

So, I had decided having experienced synthetic mescaline twice before at decent dosages, I would experiment by combining it with LSD, as this was the last of my stash and I had heard great things about this particular combination and here was an opportunity to try it. I’d really enjoyed the past mescaline experiences but found the visual domain much less inspiring than what I experience with cactus, so I hoped that the LSD would more fully open the doors of our visual perception. My sister and I were taking 650mg (approx) of the mescaline, and one and half tabs of acid. My friend is sensitive to the nausea of mescaline so he took around 500mg with two tabs of the acid. We are all in good spirits catching up and looking forward to the experience. The setting was our living room with appropriate lighting, tasty musical habitats to explore, sofas and pillows, a fair few plants, my sister’s beloved little dog, and last but not least a tropical aquarium with fish and other things in a great variety of forms and colours, and something really, really nice and relaxing to look at.

The come up was gentle, the acid first. I felt some stomach awareness but this passed, and I didn’t purge this time with the mescaline, or feel much in the way of nausea. The last two times I did. My friend was sick and felt better immediately. The sun was starting to go down and it was a really nice evening. The mescaline started to build...and build. We all had the desire to stretch out. My sister and friend felt tension in their upper back and shoulders...not from the mescaline per se; just the mescaline was bringing to the surface imbalances in posture and a desire for massage. My sister experienced tangibly and more so than any experience previously the feeling she was being thoroughly examined and scanned in a healing sense. She had a little pain in her ovaries which passed...this is interesting in that the first time we took mescaline together, a lower dose of cactus extract...she had experienced pain in her ovaries, and a feeling like they were sapping her energy, so she went to the doctors and got diagnosed with dermoid cysts which had to be surgically removed. So mescaline I feel definitely has a particular attribute for self diagnosis, and not in a purely mental sense.

The fusion of mescaline and lysergic acid was fantastic. There was energy and colour from the LSD, and this earthy grounded sensual body feeling from the mescaline. I felt enveloped in thick walls of soft bliss and comfort; it felt benign and like the air in the room was thick with it. The LSD added some nice colour, depth and vividness to the visual domain. We were split between wanting to dance a bit and just stretch out and chill on the mescaline. Another difference from the cactus is I find the synthetic mescaline more sedating and harder to move around on. Or maybe I just felt less inclined. But I recall a few woodland adventures into the night on cactus before that had been great fun, but this just wasn’t the vibe with the pure stuff.

The experience began to build more and change in character, becoming more internal, with effects continuing to build for a while. My sister has a little dog that we are both very fond of, and as the effects began to build he began to act stranger and stranger. I have heard of animals acting funny around trippers before many times, and I have experienced this myself a number of times. But this was something else. I fully appreciate we were both altered but we know this dog very well, and have done for the two years we’ve had him. He was acting very restless and we watched for a while as he seemed to be chasing something invisible around the room while attempting to chew it. It was like there was a magical moth in the room. He wasn’t running around lots though but had his neck craned upwards and it really seemed he was playing or trying to chew on something we simply couldn’t see. This behaviour went on for some time, and was of concern to my sister. I reassured her and said he certainly didn’t seem scared, more just curious and playful. It was very strange though and I would love to know what was going through his doggie brain then. It really seemed something was up, and I haven’t had that kind of experience before.
Effects continued to build. The sun had gone down and it had clouded over. I felt a little tinge of darkness then. The trip was shifting gears into something else as the creeping mescaline started to peak. It was around then that my sister started to seriously freak out. She started to get very anxious and voiced all her insecurities, and kept worrying about her dog. This wasn’t good but I have encountered this kind of situation before and we were both talking her through this. She said the experience had become incredibly internal and introspective and that all her senses had crossed over into each other and it was incredibly confusing.

I went into the kitchen having rolled a joint to get some frozen food for the fish in the tank. I walked into the kitchen and heard screaming and shouting and ran back into the living room to find my sister was scrabbling madly for the window and tearing off cloths. She was very distressed...to her, she would later explain, everything, including herself and us, the whole room, was on fire and melting. She could smell it, see it clearly but she really felt it too. She thought we were all burning alive together, and when she looked at us, it looked as if we were melting like molten lava, and this seemed incredibly real to her, so was a truly terrifying thing for her to experience. She got up a few times, and after her going for the window I had to physically restrain her a few times, something I’ve never had to do. She was convinced she was dying, along with us, and she kept having this experience repeatedly in cycles. I could kind of sense that she was both inside and yet outside of herself somehow. For a time I think she really felt out of body, but she described us as being with her there. At other times she wasn’t really aware of the room we were in anymore. Part of her was glad she was on the drugs as she thought these were killing some of the brain as she was dying. She voiced the same anxieties and concerns in cycles. Her concern for her dog was interesting in that she didn’t refer to him by name just a little dog that we need to care for. My friend and I just comforted her and hugged her and reassured her. It was horrible to see someone you care about so much experience such mental agony. And I was the one who had provided the doses, so it was partly my fault. While this was going on I was obviously a lot more focused on her than myself, but I noticed that despite this, my trip had taken on a really dark nature...the visions I was seeing, especially of people’s faces changing, were really grotesque, and the earlier beautiful fusion of the acid and mescaline seemed to have fizzled out and it felt a bit now that my mind and body were caught between two different opposing powerful currents of the drugs. I saw my sister's face grow grey before my eyes when she felt she was dying which wasn't nice to see. But I didn't trust my perceptions at the time. My pulse was elevated and it felt like my blood pressure was up, and I had weird and uncomfortable electric tingling in my body. My friend didn’t experience this discomfort, but the ratios of mescaline and LSD he ingested were different to myself and my sister (more tipped towards the LSD side of things).

My sister was also really hot and sweating profusely, and I thought she may have had serotonin syndrome...this, along with the body tremors and confusion made this seem quite likely. She does take the SSRI citalopram, (which I personally don’t like) but she has taken this along with LSD, psilocybin, 25i numerous times and only had very positive experiences without any trace of physical or psychological discomfort, and had taken her last dose a few days before. So it seems the combination of mescaline and LSD could well pose a risk to people on SSRI’s, so I would caution anyone on SSRI’s to tread very carefully indeed when experimenting with psychedelic cocktails. I also suspected serotonin syndrome from the cyclical nature of her anxieties. When everything was at its very worse for her we told her to let go and not fight it, and often with psychedelics this release can end one’s suffering. She said afterwards love for others in her life was the only thing she still held on to. She did let go but all her anxieties and insecurities would come and bombard her again repeatedly in a cyclical nature. It is possible that marijuana may have contributed to the confusion, although it wasn’t affecting me or my friend in that way; on the contrary it seemed to me to meld very nicely with the mix we had going on, and the combination was very pleasurable.

After reassurance and hugging for a while, the anxiety attacks began to fizzle out in intensity and regularity. Later on it was much easier to talk her out of these loops of doom. Primal brain circuits had been activated though so even when she was ‘back’ from this, she had a strong aversion to candles burning or a joint being smoked, lest the whole room erupt into flames again.

This was the only time my sister can ever say she experienced true terror. It is bizarre the extent to which one’s own mind can rebel against the self and devise extremely convincing and elaborate plots that work against one. Yet it is the experience of terror, to be gripped by the fear of losing everything in an instant that really makes you appreciate all you have in your life. So despite how horrific this experience was to my sister at the time, AND how horrific it was for me to witness this, she came back with some profound and lasting positive revelations on love, life and consciousness. I don’t really label trips as ‘bad’ or ‘good’, this seems far too shallow a way at labeling them...I guess this trip would be a monumentally bad trip for my sister, but in my experience, it is the more difficult experiences one learns more from and brings more back into their sober waking life. We all had the old reoccurring revelation of just how difficult these types of experiences are to put into words...words are great n’ all, just not up to describing the nature of such experiences that transcend their labels to such a degree.

The latter part of the trip was nice. My sister was back and compos mentis; she was clearly exhausted and slept for a while on the sofa. My friend and I talked and listened to music, the electrical nature of consciousness seemed to keep coming up in conversation, and at some point we experienced a rather strange technological malfunction I cannot easily explain. We were listening to a playlist of new albums I had downloaded onto my iPod and prepared for the trip, and through my friend’s recommendation. We were listening to an album on this playlist, a Bluetech album, and the music very suddenly switched to something else. I am not sure what, but it was something with female vocals I didn’t recognise, but definitely not my kind of music. The fact that myself or my friend didn’t know what it was, was strange. I am very familiar with all the music on my iPod, I don’t have ‘filler’ music, and yet I am adamant the music that played is not on my iPod. It played for around 12 seconds before returning back to the Bluetech album, and my friend clearly experienced this too. Now, having downloaded many of these albums, it is possible that this snippet was downloaded with the music somehow, but I have listened to these albums individually multiple times and it has never come up, but for some reason it is now a part of the playlist. My sister identified the singer as Mariah Carey, and I don’t have any of her music in my iPod. The iPod dock also has radio capabilities, but it was on iPod mode at the time so that shouldn’t have made any difference. It seems people tripping report electrical/technological glitches with a fair degree of frequency, and this was definitely a bit odd. Since the trip there have been a few other malfunctions, and on his return home my friend’s computer suffered multiple major malfunctions having been completely fine before, requiring several reboots and some degree of effort to make right again.

We went on a walk at some point the next morning in the park in the sun which was nice, nature is always grounding. We got a few hours sleep and then stayed up for the rest of the day chatting and chilling, and all really enjoyed the rest of our weekend together. My friend decided it would not be wise for him to drive that day on so little sleep and stayed an extra night which was nice.

My sister had a headache the next day and was tired. This went away though leaving a little residual tiredness for another day, but otherwise she felt good and grounded and the insights of the experience are still very much with her.

I would urge definite caution for anyone on SSRI’s who is planning to try a psychedelic cocktail of some kind. The combination of two different chemicals may well be more than the sum of its parts in a biochemical sense. Also these compounds certainly aren’t toys, and this experience reminded us of their incredible power.

Sister view! ~ after only about 20 minutes I felt the mental shift, it was gentle and soothing and the slight, teasing movements soon began: in art work, carpets and on the wall. Almost instantaneously alongside this, I had the urge to create myself a comfortable, cosy cushion bed on the living room floor besides the fish tank and facing the windows.

As soon as it was ready I lay down and could feel some medicinal power working its way through the inner of my body. At first this power focused directly on my ovary area, like the last time I took mescaline which soon lead me to discover that I had ovarian cysts that had a cancerous danger and which needed to be removed surgically, and, for he second time, I couldn’t help but massage them and feel the inside of me being paid attention and worked on. It did hurt but not in your normal, sober pain-sense way, but the hurt version you can experience under these circumstances instead. This lasted a while and then I found myself massaging my neck and the top of my back, my hands knew exactly what to do and I was finding the exact knots that have been causing me pain in the working week recently. It felt good!

However, this medical attentiveness didn't stop or lessen, it was constant and was becoming stronger as were the visions in both intensity and speed, the clouds for example were now rolling and skimming noticeably fast across the sky in an exaggerated cartoon, thunder storm type way. The medical checking was now working on my physical body, my muscles as well as my skin. I wanted to control it after a while and the boys wanted to attempt playing UNO, as we had previously said we would! So I sat up and my posture was demanding to be corrected and straight, and I couldn't stop twisting my neck to stretch the muscles, and it was a good feeling but demanding in an out-of-my-control way. We started playing UNO and I think this is when my first paranoid thinking started. Because I couldn't get a grasp on the simple rules and kept on saying, "wait, can I...?" Being typical of me, this would normally just be funny and not matter, but my altered state was telling me otherwise and I began becoming sure that our friend (A) was looking at my brother (B) in a "really!?" type way and that B was thinking it would be best to just ignore me. I knew these things weren't true and I tried to push them aside but my whole posture had turned so that my head was pointing away from A and more at my brother, and to look at A, someone I love very much, would bring the insecure thoughts flooding back, and I couldn't understand how a game of UNO could take such a sinister turn. I had to concentrate and sort of stalk their actions to make sure, but it didn't take too long to realise that B and A were both definitely also in completely trippy worlds, undergoing enveloping journeys of their own, and that at this point I wasn’t over tripping nor the center of a private side topic of the little, stupid girl in the room. We then attempted to return to giving the UNO game a real try, I wanted to so I joined the group mentality and, for a short time, understood where we each and all were, and that this paranoia was silly and would pass, and managed a bit of cards-playing with some laughter and rule remembering. However there was still doubt and darkness in my mind, I was trying to displace it.

We all agreed we had given it a good attempt and that we would move the night onwards to wherever it was going to take us. With the gradual arrival of the darkness of night, I also felt a darkening shift in my mental state, the only way to describe this right now is exactly that, dark and heavy, but not scary or overwhelming, yet, I then found myself in a yoga-type position, bending over on the floor with my head between my knees. For me this would usually be too much of an attention-seeking kind of position, a weird one, but I couldn’t help but stay in it, while I felt the trip getting stronger and stronger, with a strong sense that it was going to go somewhere I didn’t want it to go. I soon forced myself to lie down on my side, facing the underneath of the table, where my dog now was, and behind him I could see my brother if I twisted under a little bit. This is when my dog started chewing and following something otherwise invisible in the air under the table, between B and me. I wanted to close my eyes but thought I should be experiencing the sights and that A and B would think that’s a wrong thing to do. During my last look into the clouds outside of the window, the specific area of cloud I looked out, twisted and formed into an evil-joker face; I acclaimed out loud to my brother that I could “see Mr. Mescaline in the clouds.” The battle of wanting to refrain from closing my eyes was lost, and from here on my eyes were either closed or open, but I am not sure because everything I saw, I now know but certainly didn’t then, was definitely not there.

The next few hours are hard to order and explain clearly, because clear they weren't! I can only tell you what was going on inside my head, as that was all the reality I had, all everything, there was no material or normal sense or MEMORY - of anything, apart from right now, in my head - everything was, temporarily, lost. The 'reality' was going on in my head and we were talking and going on as normal, until I actually spoke out loud part of the conversation that 'normal life me' was having with the boys, and then this would abruptly break the 'normality' and I realised that all that I was imagining was just being imagined, and when I spoke out loud I realised what was going on was a very sinister game and realised that the conversations weren't going on at all, but they were all in my head. The game was this: if I didn't speak the two guys would go about their ways as normal. At this point B was rolling a joint and A was dancing but, as soon as I spoke out loud, because I forgot for that split second that if I spoke I would completely disrupt the peace. There seemed to be two worlds: one in the room that we were supposed to be in, having a nice, chilled night like we were supposed to be having. But the other side was the trip side, but the one I was sure was reality - only none of us could see the incredibly dark truth - the world that was preparing to take our lives away that evening.

I kept making the mistake of speaking out loud and getting ‘it’ wrong, and the intensity of this confusion worsened every time I slipped up and made a noise. I soon realised that I couldn't speak properly, as I knew that by getting what was going on wrong, I was making the situation worse and deepen towards a point of no return. So I figured I would have to just say one word at a time either to ask a question or vocalise an insecurity or worry. By this time I was so confused that words lost their meaning, and then I couldn't really remember what words were. Before I knew it the game had taken a disastrous turn and because I kept getting the game wrong, the consequences were becoming more and more serious. A part of my normal consciousness was attempting to break through and try to make sense of the whole situation. But trying to find reality backfired and instead caused a stronger sense of confusion, a state of confusion so strong, that the consequences of that confusion were more and more quickly becoming a matter of life and death. The more I tried to figure out, the more I realised I couldn't remember. I was suddenly faced with the fact that I could not remember the flat we lived in, who I was, what was this thing we were doing. In this spiral of blocked mentality I burst out and demanded "Somebody please tell me something! Anything!" the word I was looking for was quite literally 'life,' because I couldn't remember it myself, I had no idea what was the purpose of anything, what were the words for anything, even how to speak or ‘what’ I was.

I lay back down and I think after some time I opened my eyes and was having some horrible, rapid visions of my little dog weeing on me as well as humping his teddy all around me with disgusting, bright red visions of his penis out, and baring his teeth in lots of different areas all around me. The next thing I saw was him cocking his leg to wee on my face. I felt my face and, though my senses had seemed to all conjoin into one and I had no hope of differentiating between them, I was certain I was soaking wet, face, hair and all, and I was also sure that part of this wetness was his semen too. I bolted upright and to my horror while feeling for more semen on my clothes I suddenly realised I was melting in a slow, electric, amorphous type way. I looked at the table which was now my shoulder height, where we had some tea lights lit, and the only explanation I could find right then was that one or all of them had somehow spilled over and set the table on fire. I glanced towards the living room door and saw that only the dark corridor on the other side of it looked cool and airy, but from inside the living room door and all around the whole room was a thick smoke, and I quickly put two and two together and was sure that in the real world, which we were all blind to because of the trip, the living room had caught fire and in my trip I had been so out of it while lying down, that I hadn’t noticed the fire, none of us had, and we had made one HUGE mistake and this was the end - I was burning to death and there would be nothing or anything any of us could do. We couldn't call the police and we couldn't phone a friend and in our states we were incapable of putting the fire out, we were already on fire, us, the dog, the table, the room. The sensation of burning alive was soaring through the whole of my body, and the room around me was contorting and melting as one. I remember thinking that maybe someone would see me if I went into the dark outside, or even the cool air might stop the fire. A flash of my lost consciousness attempted to return here and I remember tackling with this message by wandering 'would I die if I jumped off the balcony? wait, I'm tripping, this could be a really bad idea, try and think, have people died from trips - particularly balcony jumping trips - before?' The answer was not there. I am guessing it was at some point during these thoughts I jumped up and was scrabbling for the windows and tearing my clothes off. This is HIGHLY unlike me, I am wretchedly insecure of my body, something that also came out in this trip, but funnily enough I do have a snapshot of looking down on my body and seeing my knickers and trousers down by my feet. But I remember viewing this at the time, and the result was neither self-consciousness or even self-applied, I looked at these bare legs as if they were not mine, and if they were mine then it probably wasn't happening, and there was nothing I could do about it anyway. At the time, I certainly didn’t recall doing it to myself; however I do almost remember jumping up and true and terrifying panic taking over and engulfing me. When I got up the extent of the situation hit home and the flames and burning and melting were out of control – it was happening, it was too late.

The next time I feel like I opened my eyes, I was now, new-to-me, on the sofa. My brother was holding me and looking into my face from my right, and A was staring into my face with fear-wide eyes on my left. The look on their faces hit home and I knew something was up and had seriously changed the vibe in a bad way. A was saying "you've got nothing to worry about, what are you worried about?" The way he phrased it made it seem as though this wasn't the first time he'd asked me it, and in a sudden epiphany I realised the answer to save us all, to save us from the trip which I now understood was the world that was on fire, but had the very definite reality of burning us all alive if we let it go too far. In an instant I understood the answer and cure, and had to vocalise it all at once. In this episode of declaration I verbalised that I was worried that we were all dying, it felt and looked like the room was on fire, that we should put all the candles out, that the name of the game was confusion and I was getting lost in it, that there was a dog that we should be worrying about, and, last and definitely least, that I ‘looked bad’!

I don’t remember what they said exactly, but I knew they were trying to soothe me but I had already started lapsing back into it, and was once again sure that they couldn’t see it, that we were all dying, all on fire burning alive, the room, the fish tank, us, the dog, and I leaned back and in front of my vision was being enveloped in flames and twisting round from my peripheral view and edging it’s way in a melting, circular fashion towards the very center of my vision. The panic was strong and I knew I had the power to stop it all but I just couldn’t figure out how. In desperation I was thinking through my options and trying to figure out this horrific game’s main rule, and realised I had to snap out of it by getting it right and focusing on and verbalising the facts. At absolute peak point the world and boys on either side of me had twisted and contorted around the center of my vision. I could feel as well as see the pain of burning fire inside me, melting me alive. As I looked at my beloved boys I knew that they too were despairing of the fact that it was all up to me, we were all burning alive beyond repair, and that it would, within seconds, be too late. We would die from this Earth and in the morning all that would be left is burning ash.

At that point I shouted and sat up “wait wait wait wait wait!!! OK, OK, we’re dying, we’re dying, we have to do something, I’m so so sorry, we’re dying, we’re all burning alive, I’m burning alive!” I turned to my brother and genuinely asked him, we’re dying aren’t we, I’m dying? The response I saw was a nod and tear in his eye, the fire and melting had temporarily subsided; yet I was still sure I was dying somehow. I looked around the room and could see the smoke among all the surfaces was slowing alighting once again. I returned to look at my brother and remember thinking, ‘it’s such a shame, this beautiful man, who I love so much, this one trip, this one mistake or slip-up, is going to be the end of him, of all of us, and what a shame, what a waste, that would be’. I started to cry as this reality retook control and I declared out loud the things I was letting go of. I said “so there’s no morning, there’s no waking up, there’s no going to school (where I work), there’s no K (rediscovering my dogs name), there’s no sun, there’s no mum, there’s no granddad, no D (my soul-mate, life-lover, who couldn’t be with us on this evening) there’s no us, there’s no you”.

I cried more and closed my eyes while being hugged by B, I also had my arm around A and I told them that I loved them, and said “as long as K knows, as long as he knows I loved him as best I could, as long as all of you know…” The burning had returned and I remember some serious leg tremors going on as I lay on my side leaning on my brother.

My legs began to shake more and more, violently so, and I don’t know if K really was there but at this point I looked down and he was snuggled into my tummy as we were lying on the floor. I stroked him and repeated to myself, that I loved him and I loved the boys, I looked at him and remember thinking how sorry I was that he would have to burn alive with me, I could see flames rising around him and his body melting slowly beneath his singeing fur, I told the boys that I was so sorry, so so sorry, they said it’s ok and this only further affirmed that they too were letting go, and we were all in the realisation that this was the end, one trip had been the cause of it all, and there was nothing any of us could do. And in my head, with my eyes closed, I now saw darkness. However I was never fully gone. Because in the darkness I did have something to grasp onto, I had love. I felt it so strongly and my metaphorical hands were reaching out in front of me and clutching onto it because it was, and is, everything. I could see the faces and was saying the names inside my head of some people I truly love, I thought of my boyfriend, my brother, my mum and my granddad. And I remember thinking, this is the end, but as long as they know, truly know, that I loved them and will love them forever, then that is the most important thing and all that ever mattered. From previously worrying about work and day time, none of the other things mattered anymore, and love was the only reason, the only cause and the only matter of importance; and I hadn’t lost it, I had found it in a more profound, intense, beautiful way than ever before. It was all that mattered and everything, and I knew that all this love I felt, for the people in my life that I was thinking of, was wholesomely and unconditionally true and pure. I could no longer see their faces but I saw their soul, they each shined a bright, active, silver glowing trail of iridescent silver/white body-streams. It didn’t matter what they looked like, what anyone looked like, because when we truly love, we love the soul and this is the only constant and matterful thing which exists throughout the whole expansion of our lives, and as an old man, I could see my boyfriend, and his glowing, energetic soul and knew that our souls would still be connected, and in love, because they had electrically conjoined with each other in a magnetic, irreversible type way. I don’t know how long after but I suddenly became aware that I was clutching onto my brother, almost lying across his chest, both on the floor. A was at my feet, and my first thoughts while coming back into the world, was that love is all the same. True love, for anyone, family or otherwise, is holding each other, embracing, non-embarrassing, rich, and intense love. And if you loved anyone properly, then that would be the truth of it.

This calmed down and after a long time of gathering together the reality that I hadn’t died, that we had survived, and that K was still here, tired but fine. I searched my surroundings and reabsorbed the room bit by bit. I looked at A and it seemed as though he was lighting a joint, I realised he wasn’t when he answered my fear of “careful of the fire, we should turn everything off, all candles and everything” by pointing out that everything in the room had already been blown out, and used my funny language to respond to me specifically, that everything (even though I was talking about fire be it a lighter or candle) had indeed been “switched off.” My brother later moved me up onto the sofa. I remember feeling completely drained and exhausted, mentally and physically, and I clambered onto the near bit of sofa and curled up. K immediately joined me and began curling up with me to sleep too. This hugely comforted me but I was also flooded with a familiar feeling of remorse for anything I had put him through. I fell asleep and when I woke up, I was exhausted yet uplifted. I welcomed back the light of day, and another chance at this life we all share.