The Art of Looking

~thebogboys

I've only taken acid once, technically twice (though the first dose was incredibly small), but even with that I have noticed that there are numerous tiny but certainly perceptible shifts to my mind that I was unaware of prior. I find myself much more easily able to just sit thoughtlessly and drink in my environment, or truly *taste* a good meal, or become starkly aware of the utter geometries of random everyday objects, or feel a sort of supervisual shift when I watch a car drive by—as if I had ‘changed lenses’ and the frame rate somehow improved at the same time—or become keenly if annoyingly aware of the microscopic bits of dirt on my windshield between myself and the road. Nothing has changed and everything is different. Even at the point of tripping, I never really felt like my vision was any different from sobriety: sure, there were subtle visual distortions but who doesn't see those sometimes? Things that seemed to just float apart a little and coalesce again as soon as I looked directly at them.

My mind is affected in similar ways. I am talking to someone, and I'm really, *really* looking at them. As I said earlier, I'm drinking them in. It's the phenomenal sense of really experiencing a connection in communication, and that feeling is a bit uncanny. It's sort of like suddenly noticing the sensation of the surface of your eyes. My mind fixates on strange little ideas, like how the distance between me and the other person feels unapproachably massive, how I want to hug them but doing so would be like trying to reach across the Atlantic to hug someone. Feeling comfortably glued to a place and unwilling to get to unstick myself. Looking at the muscles in a person's face and how they contort into different expressions. Those tendons in the neck that pull the shoulders up when they grimace.

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I'm looking at my lover and her eyes become my entire life for a while. I feel my anatomy and in the moment I pretend that I am one of those drawings from school textbooks that detail the venous and muscular structures of the face. I'm hollow sockets and suspended eyeballs stuck on her—we're a couple of apes just acting out millions of years of evolutionary psychology, apes wanting to be looked at and noticed and wanted, apes holding secret internal fears and desires, apes coming together in that profound and profane act. For a short time I am pre-cognitive.