The first time Patrick and I took LSD together, we were naked outdoors before noon.
The land in Columbia, North Carolina backed into forest on three sides, a creek at the edge of it running down into a pond. No neighbors. No road noise. Just trees and water and whatever we actually were underneath everything we usually carried.
By midmorning we had gone feral. We stayed outside for eleven hours, and neither of us thought twice about it, because the medicine had dissolved whatever we kept between ourselves and the world, and what was left was honest in a way we didn’t know how to be otherwise.
We were two creatures who had remembered what they were.
The creek chubs moved through the pond shallows in formations that felt intentional. Bullfrogs let us get close, closer than should have been possible, and then let out this high, almost-human shriek before launching themselves into the water. We figured out they were hunting the chubs and started tossing bits of food into the shallows. The fish gathered instantly, flashing silver in the sunlight, and the feeding frenzy drew more frogs from the reeds.
A snapping turtle surfaced once and looked at us with what I can only call patience. A hawk worked the tree line all afternoon.
We became the child rulers of a small kingdom. We were innocent in our delight, enchanted by every creature that revealed itself to us. Every new appearance felt like a gift.
We spent hours absorbed in the affairs of this tiny world, convinced there was nothing more important happening anywhere else.
Near the edge of the pond, a nymph climbed out of the water onto a blade of grass. We both went still. It held there, and then it split itself open and became a dragonfly, cerulean blue, the color of magic made visible. It dried its wings in the sun and lifted into the trees.
We didn’t say anything. Some things ask only to be witnessed.
The medicine hadn’t changed the world. It had simply removed whatever stood between us and it.
Patrick was the one I trusted to see me completely unbuilt.
At some point he squatted down to pee in the dirt and I looked over right as it happened and we caught each other’s eyes and laughed until we couldn’t breathe, because there was something in it — a man his size, nothing hidden, completely unbothered — that was the funniest and most tender thing I had ever seen.
I burned that day. My chest worst of all, a sunburn that crossed into medical territory, nipples and everything, and for days afterward I pressed bags of frozen peas against my skin just to exist inside my own body. I would do it again exactly as it happened. That day the medicine and Patrick became inseparable to me. A door we walked through together into something true.
I did not know, lying in the grass that day, that I would someday need to find him on the other side of a door I could only walk through alone.
Solstice, 2026. A circle in the mountains. One year, nearly to the week.
The medicine came on and I went to Costa Rica.
Not as a memory. I was there.
The iguanas in the trees, ancient and slow, creatures that have outlasted every catastrophe the earth has thrown at them. The macaws crossing the sky in pairs, red so brilliant they hardly seemed real, birds that only make sense against a backdrop of open sky. The coffee on the private veranda overlooking the ocean below. The best coffee either of us had ever tasted, and I mean that with complete specificity.
The ceviche I made from the mahi-mahi Patrick had pulled from the ocean earlier that day, and the mango I had picked from the trees. Patrick reaching for me across a table in the starlit dark. The tequila. The sex that belongs to people who already know the rest of their lives are arranged around each other. The nights we talked about what came next, laying out the plans like we were already there, like Costa Rica was already home.
I could feel him. In the circle, in the medicine, I could reach out and he was right there, and some part of me that needed this more than it needed the truth said — okay. This is where he lives now. I’ll come back here. I’ll find him in this. I can survive anything if I can still have this.
Then I was standing in the airport, watching the two of us wander through a gift shop before the flight home.
And something inside me started screaming.
Don’t go.
Just stay.
I could feel the grief coming. Not as a thought. As a wave breaking over everything. I wanted to grab us by the shoulders and drag us back out of the airport. Back to the ocean. Back to the veranda. Back to the life that still existed there.
Just stay.
I started bargaining.
What if we missed the flight? What if we stayed another week? What if we bought the property sooner? What if we moved there when we first talked about it? What if we took a different path home? What if I paid closer attention?
I tore through every ordinary decision we had ever made looking for the hinge. The moment where everything could still be changed. The conversation. The choice. The turn. The door.
Just show me where I made the mistake.
Show me where to go back.
Show me what to fix.
Because if I could find it, maybe none of this would happen.
Maybe Patrick would still be alive.
Maybe the future waiting for us in Costa Rica would still be there.
But every road I followed ended in the same place.
And whatever was left to bargain with finally gave out. The grief would have its due.
The medicine woman was holding my head and stroking my hair. I was sobbing from the dislodging ache under my ribs. The kind that implodes the chest. That forces something up and out, something the body has been holding, waiting for a floor and a pair of hands to release it.
For a little while the medicine had let me believe I could keep him.
But there is no substitute.
And what broke open on that floor was not only the loss of Patrick.
It was the loss of the life that was waiting for us.
Not some imagined future. Not a fantasy.
A real one.
Close enough to taste.
Close enough to walk through.
Close enough that we had flown there to look at it.
I could see it all. The ocean. The house. The mornings. The coffee. The years.
All of it still standing there.
And none of it reachable.
That was the truth the medicine had brought me to.
Not that he was somewhere else.
That he was gone.
That I loved him.
That he died.
That the life we built together died with him.
That there is no substitute.
There is a goddess named Isis.
She and Osiris were twin flames, born into the same breath, the same moment. They grew up knowing each other the way you know yourself — from the inside. And somewhere in that knowing, they chose each other. Lovers. Partners. Equals in every sense. Two beings who had found in each other the precise shape of what they had always been looking for.
Then Osiris’s brother Set murdered him.
Murder alone was not enough for Set. He took the body apart and scattered it across the earth, as far as pieces could be carried, so that there was nothing left to find. So that it was over. So that there was no coming back from this.
Isis searched anyway.
She moved across the whole world gathering what remained of him, piece by piece. She held each fragment like it was sacred, because it was. Because it was him. Because even in pieces he was more than everything else.
She brought him back together with her own hands.
She breathed life into him with her own breath. Long enough to conceive Horus. A son. The only proof she would ever have that he had been there. That they had been real. That something of him would keep moving through the world after he could not.
And then Osiris went back to the dead.
I understand everything she did.
The searching.
The bargaining.
The refusal.
The desperate hope that love might somehow exempt us from reality.
I am a childless widow, and that is a specific grief I had no language for until I was inside it.
Nothing shared between us that outlasts the two of us.
No child carrying his eyes.
No daughter asking me what he was like.
No living place where the two of us continue.
Just what we were to each other.
And now just me.
But she doesn’t get to keep him.
Isis. The most powerful woman in any mythology I know.
She searched the whole earth.
She gathered what was left of him piece by piece.
She rebuilt him with her own hands.
She is a goddess.
And still, even she does not get to keep him.
I think about that often.
Because if anyone should have been able to bargain with reality, it was her.
This is what the medicine does.
It is resurrection at partial power.
You can go there.
You can feel them.
You can speak to them.
But there is no substitute.
The medicine does not erase that truth.
It brings you to it.
Isis grieves.
She grieves in front of the other gods, openly, without apology, without rushing herself through it, and no one tells her to move on, because everyone around her understands that what she is doing is sacred.
Goddesses are not above grief.
Neither am I.
Because grief is sacred. And what is sacred demands a sanctuary. A ritual to meet it.
That is why we gather in circles. That is why we don’t do this alone.
The part of me that stood in that airport screaming at us not to go.
The part that bargained for any version of him she could keep.
The part that is still furious, that there is no substitute and that this is what the rest of my life is now.
That part of me gets a sanctuary too.
I do not have to be healed to be held.
That may be the hardest lesson of all.
Not that Patrick is gone.
I learned that the morning he died.
The harder lesson is that there is no practice, no ceremony, no medicine, no amount of love that exempts us from reality. Not even the sacred ones.
For a long time I wanted the medicine to be a doorway back to him. What it became instead was a doorway into the truth.
That love survives. That grief survives. That the relationship continues. And that none of those things bring Costa Rica back.
What I learned on that floor was not how to survive him being gone. It was how to stop pretending there was a way around it.
Isis knew that too. She raised Horus alone. She became the keeper of the dead, the one who taught the living how to grieve. She built her devastation into something that could hold everyone else’s. Not in spite of the grief. Through it.
That is the sanctuary.
That is the ritual.
That is how a goddess lives when the god she loved is gone.
And that is how I live. Inside the truth that there is no substitute.
