Later that same Summer, at a different festival in England, I'm sober and talking to a woman. She's a psychotherapist, dancer, joyful, and hella cool. She's been working with eXtinction Rebellion and we're discussing grief and hope in the context of climate apocalypse. I start telling her about how my summer has been pretty heavy, about my psychotic encounter with God, of having to choose between heaven and hell - you know, just pleasant get-to-know-you chit chat - and she meets my gaze and smiles in sympathy. I feel this incredible compassion from her. I feel her total, undivided attention like I can't remember knowing in my life.
Suddenly I feel that she is the most incredible soul I've ever met. I have this overwhelming sense of knowing her, somehow, intuitively, intimately. I feel that I've known her in a past life, and she me. I feel like she knows me, in and out, naked, unfiltered, raw. I see myself in the moonlit reflection of the heart-shaped wells she probably calls her eyes that I am now floating in, lost, giddy, with a barely liminal awareness of my brain unzipping itself and folding like a tesseract around the knowledge that this creature of light and beauty exists in the universe and I must know her.
Then the sirens erupted.
I'm not talking about a heavenly fanfare. I'm not saying I heard an angelic chorus strumming my soul like a lyre as cupid's arrows pierced my mana. No, I'm saying I heard an alarm, the woooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaauuuuuuuuuu sound of claxons going off, like an air-raid warning. I'm saying I heard the psychic equivalent of "Get to cover!" and thought:
...something's up.
It almost passes me by. I almost ignore it. I mean, here I am, in one of those infinitesimally few love-as-thunderstrike moments and some piece of me, some barely cognicised instinct on the limits of my consciousness has just rung a bell like my soul is an escaped convict and the prison is reality. Reality better wake the fuck up and get its shoes on before I get away from it entirely.
And I still almost ignore it! But...
...but I'd felt this feeling before,
only a few months ago,
in a festival in Northern Europe, beneath the sun, languid and glorious, when someone had slipped me an energy ball. It was just at the moment when I was waiting for my friend to come back with the Tacos.
In that moment too, I knew something was wrong. But until this later instant I hadn't paid attention to how I had known that something was wrong. It was only the second time, when I had exactly the same experience that I suddenly remembered:
I had been waiting for my friend to come back with the food, and I had looked up at the rigging of a nearby stage, and suddenly seen myself climbing up it in my mind's eye. And a sense of danger, of alarm, had ripped through me, and I had thought I heard sirens go off as the universe tore in half. I said to my friend that I felt out of control, that I felt like I might riot, and asked her to take me back to the tents. And then I started to choke...
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