The Aftermath

The Aftermath

The third trip left an indelible, and profoundly complex, mark on our lives and on our relationship. For me, the journey did not end when the drug wore off; the process of making sense of it, of integrating its impossible truths, is an ongoing act of excavation.

For Yaşar, I sense the strategy is different, perhaps one of protective compartmentalization, a need to not disturb the sleeping dragon of that memory. This sometimes creates a difficult silence between us. It’s hard for me to bring up the subject, which can be a source of quiet pain, because the experience was so utterly foundational for me. How can I not speak of something that so completely remade my world?

The very act of writing this report has been an ordeal—a painstaking process of ordering the chaos, grappling with a shattered chronology, and reliving moments of both divine ecstasy and sheer terror. Even now, reading these words back sends a somatic echo of the experience through me, a cascade of tingles and goosebumps.

I believe that for Yaşar, the ordeal was in some ways even more terrifying than it was for me. I was an agent, a protagonist, the one at the controls, however chaotic they felt. He was both a spectator and an unwilling participant, swept up in the gravity of a narrative he did not author. His deepest fear, he told me, was of losing me forever to that immense, unknowable state, a helplessness that must have been agonizing. The moment the cosmic decree was revealed—my apparent rejection of him, written into the laws of the universe—was a fundamentally traumatic wound for us both, a shared horror that we now process in our own separate ways.

In stark contrast, my experience was one of supreme, if terrifying, agency. And for this, I remain incredibly grateful to him. He granted me the space to do what I felt I had to do: to do the ‘Lord’s work’ through to its conclusion. He could have tried to ground me, to pull me out with tranquilizers, but instead, he trusted me, even in the depths of his own fear.

Our experience feels unique, not just for its intensity, but for its narrative cohesion across multiple journeys, the way each trip built upon the last with an almost literary sense of purpose.

And yet, for all its narrative cohesion, the experience left my rational mind in absolute ruins. The story had a purpose, but I had no idea what it was. The ‘why’ of it all became a maddening obsession, and the unraveling was about to begin.