I Am Love

To Vano, the trailblazer, the friend, the kind light.

Please say hi to Molly. Her more boring nomenclature name in organic chemistry lingo is Methylenedioxymethamphetamine or MDMA. I meet her late at night at a club. The walls are adorned with mysterious artwork in fluorescent paint, featuring swirls, eyes, and infinity symbols. People in motley outfits with fluorescent weaves painted over their faces fill a cozy room without windows. The illumination from the black light lamps is insufficient to see the contours of bodies or faces clearly. However, the brightly glowing lines traced over their faces, shoulders, and backs move with the pulsating rhythm. I notice an artist standing in a corner, a guy about forty years old with greasy curly hair, who does body painting. When he starts painting my face, I see a strange gleam in his eyes with extremely dilated pupils. Until she arrives, my attempts to comprehend the place’s uncanny vibe, to embrace its rhythm, and to meld with the sea of vibrating bodies are unsuccessful.

Molly arrives with a tall, quiet guy. He darts suspicious side glances when your hands perform the hurried exchange. Then I become one with Molly in a dirty bathroom stall covered with obscene graffiti and the floor soiled with used toilet paper and pools of overshot piss. This is the moment my life splits into “before and after” periods, although complete comprehension of the gravity of this moment will only arrive days later. I rejoin the crowd and try dancing for twenty minutes, feeling out of place and lame. I grab a Coke at the bar, and forty minutes into the trip, I become frustrated and hopeless. I go outside to join my friend for a smoke, and this is when Molly finally delivers on her promise and engulfs me in her charms. The waves of pulsating warmth come crushing me in the middle of a sentence I am saying, as if somebody huge, strong, but incredibly kind and warm, embraces me. The feeling of all-consuming bliss cannot be contained; it severs the words I am saying with an awkward pause, and I smile like an idiot. Another powerful wave of warmth wells up, and I comb my hair with my right hand.

“Oh, God! This is galaxies more than anything I felt in my whole life compressed into a single second,” I think as I start laughing. Nothing compares to this experience. As I accommodate these tidal waves of happiness (which I sincerely hope will last forever), my first order of business becomes sharing my feelings with my friend. This sudden energy makes me vomit a torrent of exclamations and smiles. My friend smiles slyly, squinting his eyes; he already knows Molly and the workings of her enchantment. Yet, I see genuine happiness in his gaze behind the smug facade.

“Let’s go shake our assets,” he says, and we head back to the club.

I don’t recognize the club when I come back. It’s chock full of awesome people who smile with naïveté and sincerity, their facial expressions relaxed in quiet bliss. They all groove to the cadence of the music along the lines drawn by lasers in the smoke. I understand that I never knew what music was before this very moment. I lacked the secret sauce, the key to the lock, the ligand to the receptor. Now, the equation is solved, and music permeates me, weaving itself into the fibers of my body and soul. Full of understanding, I become one with music; I celebrate it by moving my arms, legs, toes, fingers, neck, and torso. Seemingly, every joint and every degree of freedom is employed by the rhythm. I enter a state of ecstatic resonance as everything around me becomes filled with beauty, kindness, love, and trust. The paintings are riddled with secret meanings, the air is sweet, and the icy water my friend brought tastes like ambrosia. Peaking with pleasure, I cannot contain the bewildering feeling, so I start giving out hugs, tactfully asking everyone for permission. Nobody declines the offer; they are all smiling and laughing with identical sincerity, their eyes gleaming with the love of God itself. I migrate throughout the club, everything catching my interest: new people, rhythms, and meandering weaves painted on the walls. I meet people, hug them, and tell stories.

Suddenly, I realize the artist left paints and brushes unattended, and I grab one of the brushes. “What should I draw?” crosses my mind. I write “I AM LOVE” because I finally understand the meaning of my existence. It is to radiate love, unconditional and boundless, like starlight. While I cover myself with more paint, the artist returns and smiles with approval. I put my arm around him with care and kindness. I tell him that all humans are nodes in a web of life. When we radiate love and care out into the world, the threads connecting these nodes shine bright like rays of the Sun. However, when we send out malice, anger, and hate, the nodes become cancerous, ripping away gossamer connections between nodes, and the human tapestry turns black with holes where connections used to be. It is then ever more critical for those bright nodes to never dim, burn incandescently, ignite others, and overcome the spreading darkness. This understanding of importance fills me with meaning. All other worries and troubles pale in comparison with the importance of radiating love. Filled with determination, I raise my arm high, with “I AM LOVE” written in orange fluorescent paint, and hold it until the muscles give out. I give it a moment’s rest and raise it again to shine the message into the night like a beacon for all who may have forgotten.

It’s 5 am now, and the club is closing. I have already become one with Molly at least three times, and my friend tells me to go easy on myself. He’s caring, and I trust him even though you wanted to see Molly for the fourth time. We go to a coffee shop, and two hours disappear in a joyful blur. I tell the waiter that she is terrific, and this beauty lights up the whole coffee shop. She smiles and blushes; she tells me she is confused but thankful.

I wish with all my being to remember everything that is happening as vividly as possible after Molly’s enchantment wears off. My friend reassures me that it will stay with me. To enrich my memory, I decide to go somewhere to see the Sun play peek-a-boo with skyscrapers. Before leaving the coffee shop, I vomit in the bathroom profusely. My friend worries about me, but I wash my face and tell him that I’ve never felt so good while vomiting.

The City outside is majestic! The city comprises medieval castles, stone walls, and subway dungeons. The lazy morning sun is crawling through the sky, draped in gray clouds. The city is buzzing with sounds and noises. I pay attention to them, and all of a sudden, I hear a rhythmic, soft bass melange that emerges from the low murmur of idling engines, subway ventilation humming, beatboxing of diesel engines powering halal stands, and desperate whines of industrial vacuums cleaning up confetti from the lonely, morning avenues. It all sounds like a trance track. I listened to it the whole night. I am filled with a sense of connectedness and interdependence with the surrounding world. I rush toward the world, hungry to experience as much of it as possible.

And then I realize that I am dead tired. I recall saying, “Everything has a price” back in the club, and it looks like the time to pay the debt is nearing. I still don’t know the extent of my debt, and it’s troubling. Back at the apartment, after a shower that washed off layers of paint and sweat and several more vomit sessions, I lay in bed, sleepy and tired but unable to drift away into slumber. I toss and turn as I listen to my rapidly beating heart that forgot how to slow down. The waves of hot and cold sensations wash over me. This discomfort lasts for eternity as I submerge into all-consuming apathy and sadness. My consciousness shrinks down to the size of the apartment, to the size of my shriveled, uneasy body that cannot switch to the resting phase no matter how much I beg it to. Finally, I slip into oblivion.

Over the next few days, I say very little and think a lot. I am afraid to forget these powerful feelings, these sensual revelations, but my friend was right. It all stays with me and changes how I see the world. The legacy of the date with Molly transmutes me when I think about what love is, how to trust and connect, and the purpose of my existence. I am immensely grateful for this experience because it opened up a new perspective on the world and myself.