The Integrated Masculine

Disclaimer: The following story contains references to illicit substance use. It is a creative reflection of one individual’s internal journey and is not intended to be instructional, prescriptive, or a recommendation.

The night outside hums with leftover energy…

Beyond the nylon walls of my tent, the festival still breathes—voices swirling like wind, laughter echoing across fields, basslines drifting through the darkness like distant thunder.

The world doesn’t sleep, it pulses.

Inside, I am warm, cocooned on an air mattress that crinkles with every shift of my body. Here, I am safe enough to let go.

A pressed 2CB pill slides down my throat with a sip of water, bitter on the way down, like a promise.

Later, ketamine drifts in like a cool shadow. Two currents flowing together, opening a doorway to somewhere else.

I close my eyes. I exhale. And I fall.

Flight

The first sensation is weightlessness. My body begins to dissolve, the tent unzips itself from reality, and I am launched upwards—past stars, past silence, into a sky that feels alive.

Below me, the festival expands like a constellation. The stages glow as planets, each with its own gravitational pull, each vibrating at a different frequency. I am pulled between them, orbiting, descending, dissolving into the crowds.

At the main stage, I arrive in a storm of lasers and bass. Thousands of bodies move as one organism, arms raised, eyes closed, faces melting into pure sound. I join them. My body is no longer separate—it is the rhythm, the roar, the heartbeat of the dance itself. Ecstasy surges like liquid fire through my veins, and I am both dancer and dance, flame and fuel.

Then I am swept away, lifted again, spiralling through the air.

At the atmosphere stage, the world fractures into mandalas of colour. The ground breathes in patterns, spinning fractals bloom from the sky, and I am pulled into a vortex of endless motion. The music feels like time itself unravelling, each kick a thread snapping in my chest. I twirl weightlessly, a body of light dissolving into geometry.

Another pull. Another shift.

At the core stage, it is quieter. Softer. Lanterns flicker like stars fallen to earth, voices rise in harmony, strangers leaning into one another with warmth. I sit among them, though I have no body, only presence. Their song flows through me, reminding me that even in the vastness of space, there is intimacy. Connection. Home.

The stages blur together—techno, trance, house, hardstyle—each one its own world, its own truth. I dance through all of them at once, my consciousness stretched across realities like a thread of light.

The mirror of infinity

Time collapses. Minutes, hours—none of it matters.

Instead, I am confronted with fragments of myself scattered across the cosmos. The boy I was. The man I’ve become. The selves I abandoned. The selves I’ve yet to meet.

Each flickers across my vision like reflections in broken glass.

For a moment, I don’t know which one is real.

Perhaps none are. Perhaps all are.

The descent

Slowly, the gravity of my own body begins to call me back. The stages fade. The dancers dissolve into shadows. My weight, once gone, begins to return in waves.

First, my breath grows heavy, tethering me to the air mattress. Then the tingling in my toes—small sparks of sensation, reminding me I have a body. My fingers twitch, flexing as though rediscovering themselves. My chest rises and falls, slow and undeniable.

The air mattress presses against my back, firmer, heavier, as though it is claiming me again. My skin prickles with the shock of density. The infinite collapses into the finite. The universe narrows back into a body.

I open my eyes. The nylon ceiling above me glows faintly with the approaching dawn. My skin feels strange, like I’ve only just been lowered into it—like it doesn’t fully belong to me yet.

I whisper to myself: Was it real? Did I actually fly across galaxies, dance in a thousand crowds, melt into stars? Or was it only my mind, unspooling itself in colour and sound?

The question lingers, unanswered.

But maybe that’s the lesson—whether real or imagined, the experience has stitched itself into me. The flight, the faces, the music, the weight of returning. It is all part of who I am now.

I exhale. I close my eyes again. And somewhere between the afterparties outside and the silence within, I smile.

–TIM