Bad Trip Good
By Del Darvish
I gripped the edge of the Christmas-themed port-a-potty, watching my face melt off. The mushrooms had taken hold.
My reflection stared back at me through dust-caked plastic. My pupils were bowling balls; my glittering silk sari scarf wrapped around my neon bodysuit stuck to my skin, and I was squatting over a toilet seat like some kind of mythical brown ballerina.
"What are you doing in there?!" someone banged on the door.
What the hell was I doing here? Burning Man. The Playa. A teenage rebellion sequence being played out by a middle-aged woman.
I fumbled with the zipper on my bodysuit, the one gifted to me by a campmate who was six inches taller and a third my size. Age forty-five, exhausted by the stale and stagnant life of a university dean, I was apparently now a sparkly mushroom-tripper sweating through mesh in a desert toilet.
But it wasn't just the suit. Or the dust. Or even the weird holiday decor of the port-a-potty. It was everything. My job. My divorce. My aching loneliness. The smile of my daughter, Farah, who had handed me the green scarf and said, "Just in case you need a piece of home out there."
Aymon was outside the door. "Zen baby, you in there?"
My stomach fluttered. My boyfriend. My white rabbit. The man who introduced me to "medicine journeys," then led me straight to the edge of myself.
I stumbled out into his arms, disoriented but relieved. He smiled with that Cheshire-cat grin, pupils wide. He was already well along in his trip. "Let’s get back to the healing tent. Cleo's leading the ritual."
Cleo. Instagram Cleopatra. The West Virginia witch turned Egyptian goddess. She annoyed me for reasons I was still trying to figure out in my mushroom cloud. Maybe because she reminded me of everything I pretended not to be: unburdened, whimsical, white. Or maybe because she was right about some things. And that annoyed me more.
But we went. We always went. The Playa had its own gravity, and I was caught in its spin.
We pedaled past mutant art cars, music like sirens pulling us deeper. I hit a sand patch and nearly lost it. Aymon kept riding. The moola mantra laced into the beat of the music. My grandmother used to sing that to me in Mumbai. How the hell was it here?
I found myself crying in a pirate ship dance floor. Then dancing. Then crying again. Aymon held me. "You're not dying," he whispered. "You're waking up."
And then, he broke up with me.
There. In the dust. In the dark. Mid-mantra. Mid-mushroom.
"There’s someone else," he said, his robe flapping open like his heart wasn’t. I blinked at him, goggles already fogged with the grit of grief. My ride. My guru. My guide. Gone.
I wandered. Found myself in the Temple. Read the grief etched into wood. Everyone here was aching. Everyone here was seeking.
That’s when I met him.
Cody. Sheriff Cody Jackson of Carson City. Oxford shirt, jeans, ostrich boots. Looked like he stumbled into a Mad Max sequel by accident. A red state archetype dropped into the center of the radical free-love Left.
And yet.
He looked at me—really looked. Not as a curiosity, not with judgment. Just... recognition. A man haunted by his own unraveling. We were both stumbling through a space too big for our ideologies.
He didn’t get the festival. I didn’t blame him. But he stayed. We both did. Even when the temple filled with tears and pseudo-incantations, we didn’t run. Maybe because there was nowhere else to go. Maybe because something was shifting.
I should have run. This man was the opposite of everything I had been taught I wanted. But I couldn’t move unless that movement involved merging into him.
Maybe this is what the new frontier looks like, I thought. Not blue. Not red. Not East or West. But dusty and aching and disillusioned and high, lying next to a stranger you never thought you could love.
Afterward, we talked. At the Temple. About our pasts. Our parents. Our professional masks. Our marriages. Our disappointments with everything we were taught to believe in.
He told me his wife was here. Kristen. In the orgy tent.
"She calls it freedom," he said. "I call it fucking betrayal."
I didn’t say much. Just offered him half my melted otter pop and a shoulder.
We rode bikes. Found water. Bacon. A country-western bar in the dust. We danced to 'Tennessee Whiskey'. I didn't know the words, but I knew the feeling.
He called me the smartest woman he'd ever met. I called him the first man who ever made me laugh in a port-a-potty.
Somewhere between the mushrooms and the music, we admitted it: we were both exhausted. Both pretending. Both craving something real.
We talked for hours. About bullshit. About lies. About the stories we told ourselves to survive.
Then we made love. Slow. Wild. Free.
And suddenly, everything made sense. The cowboy and the mystic. The sheriff and the shamanic dropout. The Left and the Right. Both sick of institutions. Both seeking something sacred.
We talked more. About running away. To the Himalayas. To Montana. To anywhere that wasn’t here.
We parted ways at dawn. But before I left, he pressed a silver coin into my palm. Old and heavy.
"For the road," he said. "In case we ever meet again."
Maybe it was just a trip. Or maybe it was the beginning of something else.
Something wilder.
Something we don’t have a word for yet.
Something that might just save us all.
The Playa provides. But more than that:
The Playa reveals.
THE END
Author Bio: Del Darvish is an author, educator, and entrepreneur. She has published seven non-fiction books and two edited volumes. She earned a BA from Occidental College, and two masters and a PhD from Columbia University. She is the author of the highly acclaimed “Book of Queens: The True Story of the Middle Eastern Horsewomen Who Fought the War on Terror” (Hachette Books, 2023), “Riding” (Duke University Press, 2024), “Hyphen” (Bloomsbury, 2021), “Crossing the Gulf: Love and Family in Migrant Lives” (Stanford University Press, 2016), “From Trafficking to Terror” (Routledge, 2016), “Gridlock: Labor, Migration and Human Trafficking in Dubai” (Stanford University Press, 2011), and “Passionate Uprisings: Iran’s Sexual Revolution” (Stanford University Press, 2008). Darvish’s work has appeared in a number of publications and she is on the board of directors for the Lumina Foundation, the Human Trafficking Legal Center, and the Global Religion Advisory Board. She currently lives in Arizona where she is working on her debut novel, “HorsePower,” a story about awakening through shattering the education system.