Merlot and the 5th Dimension

I died once.

Jonas had just cooked pasta with me in the kitchen, and I had been drinking Merlot he picked up at a restaurant before our date. Jonas was a sculptor from Sweden. He was tall, had beautiful bone structure, and a rebellious look about him.

As we ate dinner over intense eye contact, I didn’t feel the lightheartedness from alcohol or the red budding roses of romance as much as I felt a sudden pang of sickness rise over me. My brain started to throb like the drums of a rising crescendo in a Stars Wars score. It culminated like an inner tsunami of discomfort tearing down my coastal cities. I felt an immense pressure build up in my forehead, and all I wanted to do was, puke my guts out, lay down, close my eyes, and wait for this sickness that had come over me to leave.

“Sweetheart, I am so sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you to leave. I think the Merlot made me sick,” it took all my willpower to not spew my wine and pasta over the table right in front of him.

He stood puzzled for a split second, and then a look of disappointment came over his face. I imagined him seeing the kiss that would never happen, and if I had been able to, I would have seen it too. Jonas walked me up to bed and left.

By the time he had closed the door behind him, I had crashed into a deep, unspeakable abyss from which I wouldn’t arise from entirely for 38 days.

When I opened my eyes, heavy as elephants, in the sun hours later, the sickness was worse. My physical state was deteriorating, and every neuron, that produced thought, reason, language, and speech, was shutting down. While I swam in reservoirs of pain, my defenses had spawned a spectator within. It was like I was watching myself from above like the all-seeing eye or like the characters in the Charlie Kaufman film ‘Being John Malkovich.’

By this time my dear Argentinian friend Julia came because I told her I was ill. She came to my house and only left to go to her part-time job and buy groceries.

Julia would come in and feed me eggs, mangoes, and toast. She would talk to me, and I would respond as best I could. Although I tried to narrate what was happening to me, I wasn't "here." My perception had fractured off into layers of a winding staircase. The higher I went up, the deeper into existence I saw. I saw myself scared. I saw myself in pain. I saw myself frustrated because I had lost most control of my motor functions. Things, like standing up, talking, putting one foot in front of the other so that you could make it to the bathroom, had all become impossible tasks. Even the straight horizon that I took for granted was now slanted 30 degrees. I couldn’t process a string of thoughts. I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t grasp letters when I tried to read.

My fingers that I use to grasp and hold things like forks and pencils were now inaccessible. I didn’t have the pleasure of having my motor system connected to my limbs. Anni, the quasi-artist and 30-year-old woman who spoke Chinese and was a writer, was disappearing. Any idea I tried to form just fell apart in my head, and the intense physical discomfort hit my senses like lazers burning through steel. It hurt to go to the bathroom. It hurt to stand up. It hurt to remain lying down. The thought of smoking pot to soothe my bullshit unraveling made me want to vomit painfully. I ate aspirin -four at a time and I only felt more desperate by the moment.

The days blurred. Whatever had happened felt like living in a desolate city for 73 years. This went on for a month, my body separating from my non-physical self. Death was coming for me.

I could barely keep a linear thought. The words I am writing now are a concoction of piercing the scraps of remembering I was capable of at that time. As I died, my brain re-lived every memory, thought, and experience I have ever had. It was an emergency download. It was compressed data-wise. And as started to leave this world, the people I love, my traumas, my joys, my planetary elements, I was filled with regret. It wasn’t regret for the lies I told or the money I stole when I was a kid. It wasn’t for treating people like shit. Of all the things that could crush me like a cosmic bug, it was brushes and paint. My greatest sadness was my unfinished paintings and writings — the half-written stories about hope and the half-painted Indian boy powder blue to look like Shiva.

I saw clearly how expression was medicine. It’s some kind of therapy to the soul, and I had neglected it in myself. The betrayal was double-edged, because not only was I being a lazy piece of shit but because I had a lot left to share. It made me realize how many unsung birds walk this planet and how much human potential is burried in graveyards.

Every feeling I ever had came back, and again I was left holding the corpse of what I was supposed to do before all of this was over. I lamented the books I never wrote. I saw the violin I never played. I saw all of my dreams never come true, and I fucking died. I died the way all men do when they get cancer. I died the way a man does when he no longer breathes, and the world is ripped out of him. The ideas of what life meant to me, was like the edge of a swimming pool a child holds onto. But there was nothing left to hold on to.

While tears seared my face from grief and sadness, I finally gave up. I let go of life in every way you can let go. Every thought and concept and belief and construct dissolved. I learned that everything that we experience exists because we give meaning to it. On a scale of All, the soul was just reintegrating into Source, and I undressed in everything that made me human. I stepped out of my bones and skin because it was exhausting, and I found myself floating away into a dark warm womb that melted my fleshy exterior away.

The non-physical me let go. And I wasn’t Me. There was no Me. There was still a pinpoint of ‘eye’ left because the place I found myself was based on a sensory perception that all conciousness possesses. Whatever it was, no word in English defines what I went through.

At one point, even my boss and director of the private school I worked at came and drove me to the doctors. They ran my blood and urine and found nothing. The doctor said he didn’t know what it was, and if he had to guess, he would have supposed some viral strain of Vertigo triggered by that goddamn glass of Merlot.

When my five senses finally shut down, the closest I can say is that I went somewhere else.

This one life and everything it knew had become a pixel of one typed-letter in a word in a sentence in a book on a shelf in a library of an endless archive.

I was in a realm where my name, address, and phone number were inapplicable. And there were others. Doing the same thing I was. We were beyond deities; we were somehow a collection that formed something more significant, a unit to a whole. We were all very aware and knew what we were doing, and we were all in absolute agreement. Wherever I was, it wasn't "here."

Off in another place, Julia would shake my earth body so violently that she would pull me back into this dense world. My spirit would slam back into the shape I no longer had control over. How I wished I could my friends that came to take care of me. My eyes, heavy as ten cement trucks, would fork themselves open only with an enormous amount of strain. I couldn’t tell my friends that I was infinite, that I was very much alive somewhere else, perhaps even more so. Words wouldn’t come. Facial expressions were lost to me. I didn’t fight to stay in this world any longer until one day I saw Julia crying in fear.

I had a choice to make, to leave her in desperation and die fully or come back and tell her to shut the hell up. Funny, I decided to go back and ask her to stop crying. I loved my friend that much that I didn’t want to cause her pain. I’m glad I did. Julia is off sailing Antarctica today, after having dropped out of school in China, because she chose to take care of me when I needed a friend the most.

Before I left that realm of whatever words that do not yet exist, I was with a smaller unit of beings. It was my team, and they said goodbye to me and told me that we would meet again soon.

After I dropped back down into the thick soup of this world and woke up all the way, it took me another two weeks to teach myself to walk again and hold a spoon without shaking so severely it would drop. It was as if I was given a second chance to do it right. Whatever it was.

I’m happy to say, I have painted 100s of paintings and written a couple of books and have learned to say “yes” to anything that makes me grow. Every sunrise is a birth and every sunset a death. It is important to take responsibility of the minutes that turn into the years of your life. Because one day, there will be no do-overs.

In honor of my new life, I gave up Merlot as well.