A mild ego death, 2022

144 words

I thought I’d eaten barely any psilocybin, but it turned out I’d eaten a lot of psilocybin. New Year’s Eve— a stranger’s home— a dinner party attended by more psychoanalysts than I’d ever met in my life.

The spaghetti was ready, but I couldn’t eat. I was weeping in laughter for an hour, as I’d just learned the Mexican nickname for men named Jesús is “Chucho.”

It wasn’t that I didn’t understand that many Mexican names have their own, sometimes disparate, diminutives. It wasn’t that I had confused the Jesús, a psychoanalyst at the party, for the Son of God to whom I’d been once so devoted. It was simply that the psilocybin had flattened time and I was both a post-Christian grown woman and a fervently religious child, both of us kneeling beneath Jesus dying on the cross as we laugh-whispered: Oh… Chucho.