Grief can turn memory into a torture chamber, and acid has a way of unlocking every fucking door.
I sat alone in that dark Tennessee motel room waiting for the two paper tabs to do whatever they were going to do. I had swallowed both without realizing the hippie probably intended one dose for that night and the other for some later adventure. There was no later adventure in my mind. There was barely a next hour. He had told me to eat one because it might help me through, and I had taken both because a piece of me had died beside Dominique. The rest of me wanted to follow her.
The air conditioner rattled beneath the window. Its metal casing shook every few seconds, producing a grinding noise that sounded like it was trying to tear itself from the wall. The room smelled like cigarettes, damp carpet, and the cheap soap I had used to scrub blood from my skin. A thin strip of parking lot light slipped between the curtains and stretched across the ceiling.
I lay on top of the bedspread with my clothes still wet. My knuckles were swollen from punching the shower tile. Every pulse of my heart drove pain through my hands, but the physical pain barely registered. My body might as well have belonged to somebody down the hall.
I stared at that strip of light while shadows from passing cars moved across it. At first they behaved like normal shadows. They appeared, slid over the ceiling, and vanished. Then one of them remained after the car had passed. It spread outward like a dark puddle. The edges began curling into themselves.
That was when I knew the acid had arrived.
About thirty minutes had passed. Maybe it was twenty. Time was already getting strange, and the clock beside the bed had become useless. The glowing numbers were still there, but they seemed too far away to matter. I watched the ceiling breathe. The stained plaster swelled toward me and slowly pulled back. Water marks became faces, then roads, then blood vessels running through the bones of the building.
The darkness was no longer empty. It had depth.
I closed my eyes, hoping to shut it out, and landed back in Detroit.
The gunshots exploded without warning.
My eyes opened, but the motel room was gone. I could see the street. I could smell burned powder and hot pavement. The noise struck my chest with the same brutal force it had carried that night. Dominique was there. Her eyes found mine. Confusion crossed her face before the pain did, and then her body began to fall.
I reached for her.
Blood covered my hands.
Then the scene restarted.
The gunshots exploded again. Dominique turned. Her eyes found mine. Her knees gave way. I tried to reach her faster, as if knowing what was coming might let me change it. I lunged toward her, but memory has fixed walls. I could move only where I had moved before. I could touch only what I had touched. I could save nobody.
The loop restarted.
Each repetition broke the moment into smaller pieces. I saw the flash from a weapon. I heard one shot separate from the others. I watched a speck of dust jump from the street. I saw her hair move. I felt the warmth spreading through my shirt as I held her. The smell of smoke mixed with blood, sweat, and the sick sweetness of panic.
Reality had become a film controlled by a sadistic projectionist, and he kept rewinding to the worst frame.
I begged it to stop. I shouted at the ceiling. I covered my ears even though the gunfire was coming from inside my skull. I pressed my palms against my eyes until colors burst behind them, but every color became blood. The motel walls stretched away and snapped back. Shadows gathered in the corners like people waiting to accuse me.
You survived.
The thought came from everywhere.
She did not.
I knew that already. My mind repeated it anyway, louder each time.
I questioned every decision that had placed us on that street. I questioned why I had failed to sense danger sooner. I questioned whether I should have stood somewhere else, said something different, or moved one second faster. Grief loves impossible mathematics. It convinces you that if you calculate the past long enough, you will discover the hidden equation that brings the dead home.
There was no equation. There was only the loop.
I saw Dominique alive. I saw her hit. I held her while life left her. Then she was alive again, which meant I had to lose her again.
Hours passed that way. I cannot tell you how many. Psychedelic time does not move along a straight line. A minute can open into a year, while several hours disappear between two breaths. I felt trapped in that shooting longer than I had known Dominique. I felt as if I had always been there and always would be.
The experience was not beautiful. There were no dancing cartoon characters, peaceful rainbows, or cosmic jokes. People talk about acid as if every trip is a colorful vacation through the universe. Mine was psychological surgery with no anesthetic. The drug cut through every defense I had built during the drive out of Detroit and forced me to look directly into the wound.
Sobriety had allowed me to move around the grief in short bursts. Rage gave me something else to feel. Driving gave my eyes a road to follow. The shower gave my hands blood to scrub away. Suicidal thoughts offered the fantasy of escape. Once the acid took hold, every exit closed.
I had to remain inside the pain.
That sounds unbearable because it was. Yet avoidance had been feeding the pain. Each attempt to push the shooting away gave it more power. The memory stayed frozen, unprocessed and ready to ambush me. Under the acid, my mind dragged that memory into the open and kept it there until I stopped trying to outrun it.
Eventually I quit begging.
I lay still while tears ran into my ears. My chest hurt from crying. My throat felt ripped apart. The gunshots continued, but they began to sound farther away. The details remained clear, only their grip started to loosen. I watched Dominique fall again, and this time another memory slipped into the scene.
She was laughing.
The sound had no connection to the shooting. It came from another day, another room, another version of our lives. Her head tilted back when she laughed hard. I had forgotten that detail beneath the violence. Death had become so large that it was swallowing everything she had been before it.
Then I saw her smile at me. I remembered the look she gave me when I was acting like an asshole and both of us knew it. I remembered lying beside her. I remembered plans we had made and arguments that seemed serious back when we assumed we had time to waste. Her life returned in fragments that had no blood in them.
The shooting had been the ending. It was never the whole story.
That realization did not comfort me right away. In some ways it hurt worse. Remembering her alive brought back the size of what had been taken. Our child had been taken too, along with every birthday, every first day of school, and every ordinary morning that would never happen. I grieved a person I had held and another I would never get to hold.
Still, the memories began changing the shape of the trip. Dominique was becoming more than her final expression. Love started pushing its way into the room beside the horror.
The ceiling stopped breathing so violently. The shadows lost their faces. The air conditioner resumed being an old machine that needed maintenance instead of some mechanical beast chewing through reality. I became aware of the wet clothes against my skin and the ache in my hands.
The peak was passing.
I sat up slowly. The room swayed, though it no longer seemed hostile. My legs shook when I placed my feet on the carpet. I walked toward the bathroom with one hand against the wall. Every few steps felt like crossing a great distance.
The bathroom light was vicious. I flipped the switch and immediately squinted. The white walls glowed with a dirty yellow tint. Water still clung to the shower curtain. A reddish smear remained near the drain where I had missed a spot of blood.
I looked into the mirror.
The face looking back barely seemed human. My eyes were swollen and red. Tear tracks cut through the grime on my cheeks. My hair stuck out in wet, uneven clumps. I looked young and ancient at the same time. I looked like somebody who had lived through a war and lost every reason to celebrate surviving it.
The reflection shifted slightly as the acid moved through me. My features stretched and settled. For a second I saw myself as a child. Then I saw an exhausted old man. Between those faces was the person standing there, beaten half to death by life but still breathing.
A quiet settled over me.
It was unlike the dangerous silence that had followed the shower. That earlier silence had been empty. This one felt occupied. I sensed Dominique near me, though I will never claim I can prove what happened. Maybe the acid allowed my own buried understanding to speak in her voice. Maybe grief created an experience my mind required. Maybe people remain connected in ways science has yet to explain. I am not going to manufacture certainty where none exists.
I only know what I heard.
Her voice came through clear as fuck.
She told me she would be furious if I threw my life away.
There was no long speech. Dominique would not have delivered some polished motivational monologue. She knew me too well for that shit. The message carried her attitude, her impatience, and the kind of love that refused to pet my head while I destroyed myself.
I stared into my own eyes and understood that killing myself would not reunite us in any way I could count on. It would take the love she had given me and throw it into the same grave. It would allow the bullets to claim another life hours after they had stopped flying.
Whoever pulled that trigger had already taken enough.
I was not going to hand him me too.
The Debt I Chose
Before that night, survival had always been based on defiance. I stayed alive because I refused to let abusive relatives, crooked systems, poverty, doctors, cops, or anyone else finish me. Anger was good fuel. It burned hot and moved me through situations where softer emotions would have collapsed.
Anger failed me after Dominique died. I could hate the shooter with every cell in my body, yet hatred alone could not make tomorrow worth seeing. Revenge might create motion, but it could never build a life she would recognize as worthy of her love.
The mirror gave me another reason.
I owed her my survival.
She had loved me without demanding that I become respectable first. She saw beneath the street name, the rage, the criminal choices, and the armor. She knew the damaged kid hiding inside the man who acted afraid of nobody. If I ended my life, I would be declaring that her love had failed to leave anything alive in me.
Her love had not failed. I was simply buried under pain.
I made a pact in that bathroom. I would carry her. I would endure whatever came next. I would try to build something from a life that felt destroyed. I could not promise happiness because happiness seemed like an insulting concept that night. I could promise effort. I could promise that her name would remain attached to movement rather than surrender.
That pact became what I now call survivor duty.
Survivor duty is what remains when personal desire is too weak to keep you here. It is the decision to live on behalf of somebody whose chance to live was stolen. It turns survival from a preference into an obligation. You wake up because they cannot. You take the next step because their steps ended. You make your remaining years answer for the years they were denied.
Some people may see that as an unhealthy burden. Maybe it can become one if you use it to punish yourself. My pact was different. I was not sentencing myself to misery. I was refusing to waste what Dominique had protected through her love. The debt was paid through living, building, and refusing to be broken beyond repair.
That duty later followed me into politics and business. People wondered why I could walk into situations that frightened everyone else and act as if risk were an ordinary Tuesday. They thought I lacked fear. The truth was more complicated. Once I had watched my future bleed out in my arms, embarrassment lost its authority. Rejection became small. Political attacks were irritating, but they were not gunfire. Financial chaos could be studied and organized. Federal threats could be confronted.
I had already met the event my mind once believed it could never survive.
Everything afterward had to negotiate with a man who knew survival was possible even when he hated every second of it. That knowledge made me dangerous to systems that depend on fear. You cannot easily control someone with the threat of losing comfort when comfort was never the foundation of his life.
What the Acid Actually Did
I need to be honest about psychedelics because dishonest extremes dominate nearly every conversation about them. One side acts as if acid is poison that instantly turns people insane. The other side talks as if a few tabs will heal any trauma and introduce you to God before breakfast. Both positions are bullshit.
LSD is powerful, unpredictable, and capable of making an unstable situation worse. A person can panic, become confused, injure himself, or experience symptoms that continue after the drug wears off. Unknown paper tabs may contain chemicals other than LSD. People with certain psychiatric conditions or medications face added risks. Taking two unknown doses while suicidal and alone in a motel was reckless by any medical standard.
I am describing what happened, not prescribing it.
If someone is about to commit suicide, the responsible response is immediate human support. Stay with the person. Remove access to weapons, pills, or other lethal means when it is safe to do so. Contact emergency services or a crisis line. Get the person to professional care. Psychedelic treatment, where legal, belongs in a screened and supervised setting with preparation and follow-up.
My circumstances offered none of that. Society had failed long before the hippie reached me. I had no counselor waiting, no trusted adult to call, and no trauma team searching Tennessee motels for a young man covered in the blood of his dead partner. I received an illegal chemical from a stranger because informal mercy reached me before any institution did.
What followed still deserves examination.
Trauma often creates a rigid mental circuit. The brain detects danger, replays the event, produces terror or guilt, and then searches for a way to avoid those feelings. Avoidance brings temporary relief, which trains the mind to avoid the memory again. The unprocessed memory remains powerful. Soon a smell, sound, street corner, or facial expression can reactivate the entire circuit.
LSD can disrupt rigid patterns of thought. It acts strongly on serotonin receptors and changes communication between brain systems that usually keep perception, identity, and memory in familiar channels. Under its effects, emotional barriers may weaken. Memories can connect with thoughts and feelings that a person has kept separated.
That disruption can free a trapped mind, or it can flood it. The setting, dose, mental state, and support around the person matter enormously.
In my case, the acid removed avoidance. I was forced to revisit the shooting until the memory stopped being a sealed room filled only with death. Other memories of Dominique entered. Love existed beside horror. Her entire identity began separating from the instant she was killed.
That process is a form of cognitive reframing, though I sure as hell was not using clinical language while crying into a motel mirror. The facts stayed the same. Dominique was dead. Our child was dead. I had survived. What changed was the meaning attached to those facts.
At the beginning of the trip, survival meant guilt and abandonment. By the end, survival meant responsibility.
The pain remained. Acid did not erase it, and anyone promising that trauma can be erased is selling something. The trip changed my relationship with the pain. Instead of treating grief as proof that my life was over, I began to see it as proof that the love was real. If the love was real, then it required a response worthy of it.
Psychedelic experiences also require integration after the chemical wears off. Without integration, a powerful insight can become another strange story somebody tells at a party. Integration means translating what you saw into conduct. You write it down. You discuss it with a qualified person when possible. You identify the belief that changed. Then you create actions that keep that belief alive once ordinary consciousness returns.
My integration began with a single decision: I would leave that motel alive.
Later, it meant starting over. It meant carrying grief without letting grief select every destination. It meant building businesses from disorder and entering political fights where the approved candidates expected obedience. It meant creating structure in chaos because chaos was the only environment that had ever felt honest to me.
None of those later actions brought Dominique back. They kept her love from ending at the scene of the shooting.
Turning Loss Into Orders
People often tell grieving survivors that the dead would want them to be happy. That sentence can feel cruel when happiness is inaccessible. It asks too much too soon. Dominique’s message to me was more practical. She expected me to stay alive. Happiness could wait.
When you are crushed by tragedy, reduce the assignment. You may be unable to imagine a meaningful year. Focus on surviving the night without making an irreversible decision. Eat something. Drink water. Give your car keys or weapon to somebody trustworthy. Sit where another person can see you. Delay death long enough for the mental weather to change.
Once immediate danger has passed, face the memory carefully. Suppressed grief collects pressure. It leaks into rage, addiction, reckless behavior, broken relationships, and physical sickness. You do not have to attack the worst memory alone or under the influence of a drug. A trauma-trained therapist, trusted witness, support group, or structured writing practice can help you approach it without becoming consumed by it.
The work begins with honesty. Write the event as you remember it. Include what you saw, heard, smelled, and felt. Then separate facts from accusations your grief has made against you. “I survived” is a fact. “I deserved to die instead” is a judgment. Survivor guilt disguises judgments as moral truth.
Next, remember the person beyond the death. Record the irritating habits, stupid jokes, private expressions, arguments, and ordinary routines. Refuse to let the final moment seize ownership of an entire life.
Then ask the hardest question: What does living honorably after this loss require me to accomplish?
Your answer should produce conduct rather than a slogan. Maybe you need to raise the children left behind. Maybe you need to finish school, leave an abusive home, build the business you discussed together, or stop destroying yourself with substances. The duty must be specific enough to direct you on a bad morning.
Describe the tragedy without softening it or turning away from the details.
List the beliefs about yourself that formed afterward, especially beliefs built from guilt.
Write what the people who genuinely loved you would say if they watched you surrender now.
Choose one responsibility that turns their memory into a reason for action.
Create a safety plan for the hours when pain overwhelms that responsibility, including people to call and places where you will not be alone.
This practice is not about pretending tragedy was a gift. Dominique’s murder was not a lesson I needed, and our child did not die so I could become stronger. Fuck any philosophy that requires innocent people to be sacrificed for somebody else’s personal growth. Meaning does not excuse the event. Meaning is what survivors build in defiance of it.
My deepest sorrow became an engine because the alternative was allowing it to become my executioner.
Whenever suicidal thoughts returned in later years, I remembered the bathroom mirror. I remembered her voice and the agreement I had made. Depression could tell me I was worthless. It could tell me that everyone would be better off without me. It could not erase the debt.
I was carrying someone.
That belief formed a shield stronger than positive thinking. Positive thinking is flimsy when your life is genuinely fucked. Survivor duty accepts that the pain is real and gives you orders anyway. You may hate the day. You still complete the assignment. You may see no value in yourself. You protect the life entrusted to you until that perception changes.
Years later, people would see the fearless activist, the businessman who ignored normal limits, and the defendant who stood against federal power with an attitude judges found offensive. They would assume I had been born with some strange immunity to intimidation.
They were seeing the product, not the furnace.
My fear did not disappear in that motel. It lost its position as commander. Death had already entered my life and taken what I treasured most. I chose to answer by becoming harder to silence, harder to own, and damn near impossible to scare into submission.
Back in the bathroom, none of that future was visible. I saw only my ruined face and the weak yellow light above it. The acid was fading. The grief stayed, heavy and merciless, but a certain calm had formed beneath it.
I washed my face. I changed out of the wet clothes. Then I sat on the edge of the bed and watched morning begin to press a dull gray light around the curtains.
Dominique was gone. Our child was gone. I remained.
For the rest of that night, remaining was enough.