Super

I’ve never wanted to try ayahuasca.

But Brett said we should open ourselves to the universe.

Perhaps, if we’d been on holiday somewhere exotic it might have felt more significant.

Instead, we arrive at a basement flat in Peckham, on a monotone Saturday afternoon.

The front steps hadn’t been swept. Bundles of leaves, dirt and rubbish had fused together creating a knot of filthy debris.

Inside we are led to a dim room with scattered cushions centred around a cheap looking wooden bowl. Not a family heirloom crafted in the forests of Norway, but rather a piece from a set, the rest of which have long been lost.

There’s one window which spills a long shaft of light diagonally across the space, highlighting millions of wafting specks of dust.

The Shaman - for that was what we are told to call him - bare chested, mahogany tanned and adorned with a multitude of necklaces. His haram pants are a washed out burgundy and his thin blond dreadlocks hang down his back like dead snakes.

I wasn’t sold on the chanting either.

It reminds me of primary school Mass, and I fell foolish and embarrassed.

Brett elbows me, so I chanted a little louder.

The suspension tastes like dirty sock water. My serving is handed to me in a child’s plastic cup. It doesn’t feel very spiritual staring into Peppa Pigs’ transfixed eyes as I swallow the bitter liquid.

When the purging begins, I reached out to Brett with my sweaty hand. But he is gone. On his back staring at the ceiling, eyes open into the dimming light.

The retched bile that springs from my body comes out like an explosion. Like I had been filled with cartoon TNT and someone lit a fuse. When the shitting starts, I am not prepared. The violence with which it escapes fells like genocide. I cry for Brett to hold me, but he is staring into the eyes of the tepid woman beside him. I want it to stop, to get off the shit-train and go home to my soft bed.

In the cab on our way home, he is resplendent. Filled with the beauty of his experience. I am dark. My stomach grumbles angrily, and my mouth fells like an old dog couch.

Brett has been careless before. He has been rude, and drunk, and lazy. But the only enlightenment I left that dingy flat with was the idea that my boyfriend was a massive dick.

Anger bubbles inside me. My brain fizzes with rage. I can’t concentrate. I want to explode, to yell every nasty thing I am thinking at his face.

I turn and open my mouth but before I manage to utter a word his face crumples.

His eyes are pleading, terrified and shocked.

“Oh God.” He mutters.

“Oh my god I think I’ve just… Oh Bree help. It’s coming out.”

Then the smell hits me.

And it hits the driver.

The stench is like nothing I had ever experienced before.

Vicious, bitter, acidic and greasy.

The brown pool fills around him on the leather taxi seat.

His face is imploring.

“What the fuck? Are you shitting in my cab? You’d better not be son. That’ll cost you 150 quid to get it cleaned. Oh that’s fucking rank!”.

I lean back and pushed the door open as the taxi rolls to a stop.

“I’m sorry Brett, I can’t do this” and I jump out at the lights and run.

Part 2

He double dunks his biscuit. 

It’s going to crumble and leave a sweet slurry at the bottom of his cup.

I don’t even know why he’s here.

“I don’t want to try again Brett”

“Pfft you think you can get someone better? Like who?”

“It’s not about that, I just don’t want to be with anyone”

“Is it that guy Levi at your work? What’s so great about him? He’s a pussy bitch”

“Brett, I’m not going over this again. I just want to be alone. Your biscuit has gone soggy.”

“What does his dick taste like Bree? What, because he’s Spanish, he thinks he’s so fucking slick.”

My brain feels hot again, the bitter taste, the fizzing in my eyes. He’s only said a few sentences, but it makes me apoplectic. My fury explodes, boring into his skull.

I can’t hold it in.

His anger is gone in a moment, covered by a blanket of embarrassment, fear and self-loathing.

“Oh god, not again.”

I can hear him mumbling “Why does this keep happening??” as he grasps his coat and runs out of my kitchen clutching his backside with his free hand.

Ayahuasca must have long standing effects.

Deep in the back of my mind I make a connection between my rage and their diarrhoea that is not fully formed yet.

It’s months before the thought surfaces again.

A man in his 60’s, Craig, is mansplaining why my hypothesis around the downfall of heritage buildings under late-stage capitalism in a recent peer reviewed paper are incorrect. He is explaining basic trickle down economics, espousing ideas that were debunked during the Blair administration. His fat red face offends my senses, thin lips disappearing, baring his teeth like an ugly bulldog.

It’s making me want to drive a rusty implement through his eyeball, but I maintain my external composure, my fortnightly wage is more important than my sanity. But I can’t still my heart beating like Donkey Kong throwing barrels inside my chest.

The telltale fizz and his face crumples.Synaptic connections are made between the fizz and that crumple, but it can’t be me, can it?

Finally, my mind is made up when it happens for a fourth time.

A road rage episode that blooms into a near assault, but the fizz takes over, he bends in two in the middle of the intersection, hot black shit spewing from the bottom of his Nike workout shorts, running down his heavily muscled, tattooed thighs into a pool on the double yellow lines.

Am I now a God?

Do I have power over men’s bowels?

How should I use my newfound power?

For Good?

Nah.