GINA MORIARTY

“The trip shifts into periods of introspection, and when that vast awareness is suddenly switched inward, some may not have the mental or emotional capabilities to deal with their shadows.” – GM

In your essay,100 Words / 12 Hits / Gravity, you write from a transgressive space punctuated by the speed of an actual and metaphorical ride through the libidinal realm of union. It feels like the cerebrally exploited appendage of sex acts as a metaphysical portal to the ephemeral side of intimacy. The couple seems by the end of the ride to open to a paradoxical lack of connection. How did you identify and develop the mapping of the narrator’s drug induced confrontation with the masculine/feminine axis of desire amidst an edge of what leads unexpectedly to subtextual longing?

GM While this essay reads as though it was written in a transient state, time was my true companion. Enrolled in a Travel Writing class during the pandemic provided an interesting obstacle – writing about travel without traveling. I chose to write of a trip I’d taken the previous summer with my boyfriend, and in doing so, gave myself the chance to play around in this Creative Nonfiction Travel Writing genre. Each week my professor, Marc Neison, assigned one word to use in the telling of a 100-word short story. Marc didn’t expect us to weave a narrative, but I appreciated the challenge. 

By the end of the semester, I had 16 100-word segments prompted with words such as home, water, sunscreen, currency. These words became the landmarks to map “Gravity.” This piece wasn’t written in order, instead driven by these words set along emotional markers on the timeline of the trip. In my initial composition, the idea of balancing connection with disconnection was involuntary, but with each passing week, I noticed the theme and wrote with this harmonization of movement in mind.

Writing about drugs – psychedelics specifically – creates portals for nonfiction writing which allow space for fantastical elements, but more-so, make room for garishness, for those carnal moments to transpire. This drug-induced state erases any filter, and that can only transfer to the writing, allowing the narrator a sort of jester-like persona. With LSD the true nature of the partaker is unabashedly revealed. The connection between all who indulge together is forged by the efforts of the drug, by the shifts of frequency, and in such a way a different friendship forms as the user’s consciousness expands to a greater understanding of the persona they’re tripping alongside. The interconnectedness on such a deep level prompts new levels of intimacy, a compulsory truthfulness occurs, and the user can’t help but show their true nature.

The reason some swear against acid is because the come down requires self-work. The trip shifts into periods of introspection, and when that vast awareness is suddenly switched inward, some may not have the mental or emotional capabilities to deal with their shadows. The thing about LSD is it’s a truth serum some just aren’t ready to taste. Those, like me, who have used the drug with the objective of mine expansion instead of simply getting super trippy, tap into the superpowers we all possess – the superpower of intuition. Expressing how these characters opened themselves to the vulnerability of each other, I was able to set their motorcycle along this paradoxical axis of drug addiction that parallels their relationship, displaying how cocaine shuts out the universe while psychedelics open one’s mind to it.

It’s a perilous balancing act – not the motorcycle – but drug use in a union, because the moment one person tunes themselves to a different level – a different frequency – the whole relationship disassembles, and while both remain on an unbalanced precipice of addiction, the universe’s pressure will increase on the couple until their only chance is to split or to conform fully around each other and their chosen substances.