I Didn’t Need Acid

Sometimes the door to another world looks like a refrigerator.

I stepped into a refrigerator and walked into another dimension.

Not metaphorically. Not in the way people say travel “changes you.” I mean I physically opened a refrigerator door and found myself somewhere else entirely.

That’s how my experience began at Meow Wolf in Santa Fe.

Rooms folded into other rooms. Doors led to places they shouldn’t. Nothing followed the rules I understood, and somehow, that made perfect sense. It felt like stepping into a dream that didn’t ask permission to exist.

I remember thinking—this is what people must feel like on acid.

I never did acid.

I wanted to. Of course I did doesn’t everyone? I’ve always been drawn to anything that bends reality a little. Anything that loosens the grip of what’s expected and lets something stranger, more expansive, take its place.

But I was afraid I wouldn’t come back.

That fear started when I was fourteen.

A friend of my sister’s boyfriend showed up at our house one day. His name was well, I should probably not say his name. I don’t remember what he was wearing, but I remember how he looked to me. Off. Like his rhythm didn’t match the room. He stared too long at nothing. Moved a beat too slow. When he did speak, he spoke like he was reaching for something just out of grasp.

He spent most of the time playing pinball. I asked my sister’s boyfriend if something was wrong with him. He said, “He did a lot of acid and just never came back.”

That was it. That sentence, paired with the way I saw him that moment, was enough for me. I never touched it. Because I didn’t want to leave and not recognize the person who returned. I also am not that into pinball and couldn’t imagine having to play it every day in my life to be tied to reality.

But walking through Meow Wolf, I realized something. You don’t need drugs to experience altered reality. You just need a doorway.