You Can Paint Your Shell Nice But You Can Never Uncrack An Egg

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story + images /  Gina Tron

I like to say that I am kinda like Jesus, seeing how I was kinda resurrected from death one glorious Easter. It was April 15th, 2001 and I was attending college in Montreal. At the time I had made it a hobby to consume drugs in abandoned churches. It was kind of the in-thing to do at the time.
There was something different about the Easter party from the beginning. This rave, unlike the others, was not in a church. It was in an old hotel. The name of the party was Eggs, as the flyer proudly advertised. It also advertised that there would be a pool at a party. I was excited about the water element.
I was accustomed to taking ecstasy, and my favorite pills were the ones with a Pikachu stamp. Yellow, orange and blue Pikachus would pokemon their way into damaging my brain on the regular. At Eggs, though, I ate a brown Pikachu.
Brown…. Brown…. I remembered hearing some rumor about brown being bad once. Or maybe it was a song. I vocalized my concern.
“Oh no. That is just in reference to acid. You don’t take brown acid.”
This color made me feel better than I ever had in my entire life. I said fuck off the dance floor and hello to laying lifelessly on the floor. The ultimate euphoria consumed me and I forgot about consuming water. I was always, before this, cautious to a fault about H20.
“Why drink water when I can jump in it??”
I jumped into the hotel pool with all my clothes on. I immediately regretted my urge to do so. I know how to swim but that skill escaped me at the time. Also the water was ice cold. I frantically doggy paddled to the nearest ladder. I struggled in doing so. As soon as I got out of the water my sense of euphoria shifted into an overwhelming feeling of dread. I was now in a dystopia, a horrible hell. I was surrounded by druggies dancing under a ceiling decorated with dangling plastic Easter eggs.
I started feeling very cold and went into the bathroom to use the hand dryer to warm off. Looking into the mirror, I noticed that my left pupil was larger than the right one. I figured this was indicative of some sort of literal split in my brain and began panicking accordingly.
By the time I got to the hospital the fluorescent lights were burning my eyes so much that I couldn’t keep them open.
My roommate, who accompanied me to the ER, later told me I was babbling about video games. Which was interesting as it was what I talked about the last I was at a hospital. When I was 8 I had meningitis. Before getting sick I was obsessed with obtaining a Nintendo. Through being sick I got an NES. I finagled it out of my parents due to the pity I received after getting a needle put into my spine.

The Montreal nurses were predictably speaking French to me and I didn’t understand what they were trying to communicate to me. They gave me an EKG, and in order to do so had to take my top off. I didn’t want my roommate, who was in the room for some reason, to see my exposed chest. Though the will to live outweighed the embarrassment.
They stuck a needle in my vein and I was out cold. I awoke 15 hours later in ICU. Well, that’s not true. I woke up twice, briefly, before that. Once when I seemingly peed the hospital bed. I vaguely remember the nurse having dealing with that. A second time when I looked up at the clock to see that it was 2pm. I knew my boyfriend at the time would be calling my dorm phone. I had told him a week prior that I would try to lay off the drugs. It’s funny to think that just a year prior, I hadn’t even been able to successfully inhale marijuana. Oh how behavior can accelerate ever so quickly. When I woke up the third time, I opened my eyes to see my friend Baron sitting quietly next to my bed reading a book. At first I thought the nurses injected sedatives into my vein. I soon learned all they stuck in my was an intravenous to get me hydrated.

I was soon drooling on myself while riding the Metro. Baron was sitting next to me. There was a pacifier half hanging out of my mouth. I could not find the energy to talk or even think. Teenagers on the train were laughing at my vision of beauty and Baron was threatening their lives. He walked me to my dorm room. It was the middle of the day and there were a few people knocking on my  door. It was a day that really made me regret my decision of becoming a dorm drug dealer (and a pretty crappy one at that) in order to fund my partying needs. I ignored all drug seeking demands and hopped into my bed. I spend next few days trying to recover from my easter hangover. Darkness. End of Easter fairy tale.