DOSE:			Cocaine	(powder / crystals)
	.125 g	oral	MDMA	(capsule)

BODY WEIGHT:

135 lb

I was curled up on a filthy couch in one of my dorm's common rooms. I had a massive headache. Felt like my head might collapse. It was around five PM, and my heart was beating too loud. I tried to calm myself down, because this happened a lot after I'd done a few lines of cocaine. My heart always had this sort of chaotic, kick drum quality to its sound. Today was different, though, because I hadn't known I'd be taking MDMA at 6 PM. Obviously I am hardly a paragon of responsible drug use, but at this point I didn't really care. I was just trying to make my heart slow down and shut up so I could ingest another stimulant with a sliver of confidence. I remember a girl turned off the lights in the common room and offered me a blanket and some Valerian root. I was shivering.

I sat there shivering for an hour until my friend came and got me. She was extremely worried about me, and even more worried about my adamant insistence on taking a dose of MDMA before we caught our bus. We were going downtown to see a show, and we were nervous about taking the MDMA at the venue because we had read that the come-up from ingesting was somewhat delayed. At this point I was, to be quite honest, still relatively confused about what MDMA was. My friend had done it before, but she had snorted it, and her major report was that the drip had tasted awful (this depressed me a little, because I really like the way cocaine drip feels and tastes) and that she had felt overpoweringly happy and had wanted to be touched, but only for a short period of time. I suppose it is also important to note that when we do drugs together, my friend always takes higher doses than me and reports that she is feeling less than I do (obviously this is entirely relative).

As we were walking down the hall to her room, she kept asking me if I was sure, and I kept saying yes. So in we went, and she produced a bag with two capsules in it. The powder was a pale pinkish brown. We joked excessively about its coloration because we were under the impression that MDMA is always white. She may have even insisted on looking it up on Erowid, because at some point the jocular tone turned into a frightened one (another thing that seems to happen to us a lot). Each capsule contained 125 milligrams of MDMA, which we had read was a standard dose. Our dealer told us we could take more if we wanted, but that she didn't recommend it. As an aside, this dealer also claims to have done around 500 milligrams simultaneously, but I can't attest to the veracity of that story. She said it was “scary”.

Anyway, we took our capsules and – completely miraculously – I experienced an immediate sense of almost incapacitating calmness. This, of course, was totally in my head, but I sort of reasoned that now that I'd swallowed the capsule, nothing could go wrong, and that if it did, I would be alright. I suspect that this might have been a residual effect of the cocaine, distorting my capacity to reason. (I can justify just about anything to myself if I'm strung out and want it badly enough). My friend made a frenzied scrabble for our bus info, and then we got water bottles and RAN across campus to get to our bus stop. Even though I was feeling a little detached from the situation – again, all in my head – the running did freak me out a little. Generally speaking, running or otherwise physically exerting oneself on a stimulant cocktail is probably not a good idea, I would guess.

We got onto our bus (it takes about 30 minutes to get downtown from our campus, so by the time we arrived about 45 minutes had elapsed since we had dosed) and sat at the front being generally loud, giggly, and obnoxious for about half the ride. We thought we might be coming up earlier than expected (I hadn't eaten all day, but my friend had) because everything seemed hysterically funny to both of us, but we eventually realized that we were just being idiots. I kept asking her if I would know definitively when I had come up, and she told me a few times that I would, because “everything becomes beautiful”. Once we were downtown, we suffered from a bit of confusion about which bus stop we were actually supposed to be looking for. There were a couple other people from our college on the bus, but they didn't stop us when we resolved to get off the bus at the wrong stop.

My friend stood up before I did. I sat on the bench for a second, blinked, and opened my eyes. She was holding her hand out to me when I looked up, and all the lights inside the bus had beautiful sunburst-patterned lines radiating from them. The windows were foggy, so I couldn't really see outside yet. I looked around for a few seconds and I remember saying “I feel weird” as I stood up and she literally dragged me off the bus. And then we were standing on the sidewalk. I felt, I was sure, exactly as a newborn baby must. It was freezing outside and I was wearing a dress. I could feel, very acutely, cold air pouring into my whole body. The immediate physical sensation was both shocking and beautiful. I remember feeling like my coherent, logical, reasoning mind was floating a few inches above my body. I felt, I suppose, a little like a simpler creature. All my concerns were stripped down to a basic level, and I had an inexplicable NEED – not a desire, a need – to cling to my friend's arm.

I looked around downtown as we stood there on the sidewalk. I think my friend was trying to figure out exactly where we were. She had not yet come up and was not only perfectly coherent, but was also becoming increasingly frustrated with the GPS on her phone. I honestly can't remember a lot of what she said here because it seemed a little like muted static to me: I was so overwhelmed by the sparkling clarity of my eyes. Everything was glittering with rain and the sidewalk was full of jewels. All the streetlights had these little halos around them and headlights seemed foggy and exceptionally luminous. Everyone who passed us on the street looked incredibly beautiful to me, but I didn't feel any sexual desire for any of them. I just wanted to look and smile. And I did. And I think it scared a lot of hapless pedestrians. At this point there was very clearly something wrong with me, I'm sure.

My friend tugged on my hand and we started walking. She was leading me, and I was holding her hand. I remember feeling very distinctly that I was either a toddler or a puppy, but that I was comfortable with both. Like I said, my coherent, logical faculties were still operating, but only sporadically, and I think for the most part I was laughing at myself, because for the first time I actually felt like I was literally exiting my head. I felt like a different person, and actually, my friend later told me that my facial expressions were different while I was rolling. In some disconnected part of my brain, I felt passingly amused by the disturbed faces people were making when they looked at us. But this and, soon, all other thoughts, were eclipsed by one idea: I became utterly fixated on the idea that we were lost and would not find our venue. I was also fleetingly aware of the fact that my friend had not yet come up, and so I was totally certain that she would and that we would be wandering around lost in a bliss-abyss for days.

We had to stop on a street corner at one point because she had to tinker with her phone again, and I remember her laughing and telling me to “just stay there” because she actually thought I was going to wander into traffic. I kept looking around in wonderment, and I think I eventually stopped being aware of my feet. I felt like I was floating. She also told me that I was holding her hand way too tightly and actually pulling it downwards. I looked down and realized not only that I was doing both things, but that I was not physically aware of either one. And I laughed. And laughed. And laughed. At about this point I started asking her repeatedly if we were lost and whispering into her ear that we were not going to find the venue. I think this was making her nervous. I was only dimly aware of a vestigial nervousness that would have existed if I weren't high, but was sort of beginning to absorb her anxiety. I remember thinking that it might be appropriate for us to sit on the curb and wait to come down. Even this thought, however, seemed like a pleasant and reasonable solution. I suspect, though, that is was the product of a combination of detached reasoning skills and the creeping sense of anxiety I was getting from my friend, who I had thought was anchoring me to reality. I started to feel a distant sort of panic, and it only got worse the longer we spent on the street (a homeless guy yelled at us about how beautiful we were at some point). The feeling was bizarre, though. I was decidedly anxious, but I still felt really good. The ideas are totally incongruous but they fit into my head pretty neatly at the time.

And then, suddenly, the venue! It emerged on the horizon like some kind of glorious beacon, and I felt the most incredible wave of euphoria wash over me when I saw the glowing neon facade. I'm not exactly sure how to articulate this, but my heart felt happy. I was fluttering. We stepped inside, where it was warm and dark and smoky. I felt my body gasping at the temperature change. It felt beautiful. I think someone asked me to throw away my water bottle, and as I was dropping it into the trash can, I remember thinking the water inside was extremely hot. My friend and I presented our tickets. The guy who took them had a long, hard look at my face, and then he smiled a little and waved me through. My friend was coming up now too, and said she felt “floaty”. We linked arms and floated upstairs. In the bathroom I experienced a moment of incredible disturbance and hilarity when I looked at my reflection and realized that I could not see my irises at all. My pupils were, I should say, ENORMOUS.

When we got into the concert hall itself, I was overwhelmed by an incredible and characteristic sense of “belonging”. When I had read about a “sense of belonging” as a drug effect in the past, I had always been really skeptical of the phrasing. But I really did feel like, out of every pinprick of human warmth in the world, this was the one I was supposed to be in. This was the one I was supposed to find, and, of course, this was the one I had found. I had a sense that everything had worked out in an intentional and fluid way, and that everything in my life had culminated in my arriving at this one room at this particular time. My friend and I shoved our way towards the stage. I have never been happier to have dozens of perspiring bodies pressing against me. It felt immensely wonderful. I'll also add that after this was all over, my comedown was actually exceedingly mild, and I slept like a baby after I got home. I have never felt so comfortable in my own bed. Also, I hardly felt sad at all in the ensuing week.

I won't go into detail about the actual concert, because anyone who has ever taken MDMA or ecstasy knows that music sounds and FEELS fantastically alive. (If you are a stranger to this phenomenon, you are seriously missing out!). At some intervals I felt like the drums and bass in the concert were making my heart beat, my blood pump. I felt very aware of my experience and less aware than usual of my body, but there were no unnecessary thoughts or superimpositions. I felt like I was flying out of my head and becoming some celestial creature, and everything looked beautiful to me. For five hours, I was an angel.

Exp Year: 2010	ExpID: 88910
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jan 11, 2014	Views: 4,119
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MDMA (3) : General (1), Combinations (3), Small Group (2-9) (17)