One

I am doubtfulness incarnate.

I slap at a mosquito and glare at the blood splat it leaves across my hand. These Ecuadorian jungle mosquitoes are fucking enormous.

"Listen to the birds! The jungle is so alive."

Beside me, Chino stares in awe at the darkening treetops high above us. I look too, though all I hear is a cacophony of guttural caws.

"Alive with bugs."

I check my feet to make sure none have crawled up my boots. My heart jumps to my throat.

"And snakes!"

I spring away with a cry. Watch out for snakes, they told me. There are over four hundred species of snakes here, around eighty of which are venomous.

Chino laughs and picks up the long black snake.

"And ants."

I look at the snake in the fading light, only, it isn't a snake. It is a stick, black with ants and writhing under their communal perseverance.

"And fucking ants," I agree.

Chino laughs again and throws the stick aside.

"Lighten up, man. This is for you, remember? It will be enlightening. You need the spirit healing."

What I need is a shower and to get out of this fucking jungle and back to somewhere civilized and sensible. Chino said this jungle venture would be good for my depression and cynicism, but then Chino is the type of guy who tapes crystals to himself when he gets the flu and claims he's cured.

"Come on," he says, "the ceremony is starting."

I nod and kick my way back through the underbrush to join him and the shaman in the hut. To even call it a hut is giving it a lot of credit. The structure is a roof supported by four poles with a few woven mats across the jungle floor. The shaman, Jesús, sits in the center of the mats with a small pot of reeking brew. I'm not so sure about a shaman who calls himself Jesus and poisons people to help them reach enlightenment.

"Ready?"

I look at Chino and shrug.

"Sure."

"So excited."

I'm not sure whether Chino means he is excited or whether that was sarcasm directed at me, but before I can figure it out Jesús begins speaking in rapid Spanish.

Soon I am handed a rough, wooden bowl filled to the brim with Jesús' awful smelling concoction. I take it in two hands, fight back a gag reflex at the smell, then force down the contents in three large gulps and hand the bowl back.

Chino downs his bowl without complaint before grinning at me.

"This is it."

I suppose it is.

As we wait, Jesús began to drum. The deep sound resonates within me. It vibrates my bones and sends warm tingles down my extremities. The feeling pulses with each beat of the drum, becoming progressively more intense. My heart has begun to race and I take deep breaths to calm myself. In, out. In, out. Deep, slow, steady breaths. In and out. In and out.

I close my eyes as I breathe but behind my darkened lids is another world. Colorful geometric designs squirm against a black backdrop. Rectangles collapse into triangles which fold into lines that expand and twist themselves into helixes.

For a while I am content to watch this resplendent light show. Eventually the helixes begin to take form, falling inward and backwards into the shape of a spiral. A maze. I follow this maze deeper into the world of color, twisting and turning and descending along with the myriad of geometric hallucinations. The maze has no end, though I am striving to reach where it should be. No matter how close I get, the lines squirm further, tantalizing me with the idea of completion. But I inherently sense that there is no completion. It is like the world, evolving, morphing, changing, with no start and no end other than that which has been created by man. Suddenly I feel lost, confused, and I reach for something to ground me and I open my eyes.

I am grey in a world of color.

The hut around me is not the hut I was in. Colors bleed, run in rivers, run in streams, run in patterns, run into geometric shapes like fractals and prisms and heptagons and helixes and spirals and enneagons and…it's too much. I force myself to take a deep breath and focus. Focus on the drum beat that still reverberates through my very core. I turn to Chino and ask him if he is feeling similarly, except he doesn't respond and I wonder if he heard me, then I wonder if I even spoke out loud. I suddenly feel a violent urge to purge and I rise to my feet, only when I look around, I cannot figure out how to get out of the hut, which is stupid, getting lost in a one room hut with no walls, but I can't gather my sense of direction, so I do the only logical thing to do when lost in a room with no walls: I stumble straight.

Somehow I don't trip over anything and soon I am bent double in the underbrush, disgorging my soul through my mouth so violently that it makes me glad it is dark, else I would probably see it squirming and dripping and running, and that would unsettle me even more than these gerbil sized ants that are scuttling about my feet. I should probably be scared of these monstrous ants but they run in their patterns and trails and lines, and they do their work to create whatever it is ants create, and for some reason I am alright with that.

"Do you," I tell the ants, and I presume they do.

I breathe deep the scent of the jungle, letting it flow up my nose and out my ears and out my mouth and down my throat, and I feel unequivocally that this is good, this is right, and I wonder how I did not see it before. The ants scuttle, the spiders creep, the birds fly, the beasts run, the trees and flowers and weeds sprout, grow, blossom, and die.

I am an observer in a world of life.

I look to the stars through a canopy of shadows and see that the Milky Way has mated with an artist's palate and presented their offspring before me. Its colors are so vibrant that it looks almost neon, and the myriad of tiny prisms spread across it where the stars should have been casts an unearthly, dappled glow through the trees above me, illuminating one specific tree, a kapok tree, old, majestic, and wise, its vines reaching out and beckoning me closer and emitting waves of love and positive energy, and I cannot help but glide towards its comforting bulk.

Its bark is smooth and leathery and I run my hands up and down it and feel the power beneath my fingers, and I feel the wisdom leeching out and spreading through the jungle, and I feel the life within, nourishing billions of entities. An overwhelming sense of peace and calm floods through me and I sit cross legged at the base of this titanic pillar of wisdom and wait for enlightenment, as did the Buddha beneath the Bodhi tree, only if the Buddha had sat beneath this father of the forest I cannot even imagine what further truths he might have learned.

We sit for an age, this kapok tree and I, allowing the world to sprout, grow, blossom, and die around us, and I know this father tree is trying to tell me something, something important, but it is whispering too softly for me to hear, so I lean closer to listen, but I still can't hear the message, so I lean closer still until my forehead almost touches the bark.

"Come to me," says the tree, "I've been waiting for you."

I am a being of light and energy.

My forehead touches the tree and the world explodes with light and I am falling once more, falling into the inner bowls of this kapok tree and into its brilliance, its spirit energy. The light solidifies into a vast, white pyramid, and coiled around the pinnacle of the pyramid is a great snake with glistening white wings that flutter on either side of its swaying head, beckoning me forward.

"Welcome," says the snake. "Do you know who I am?"

I shake my head and the snake smiles, or I think it does, it is hard to tell when a snake smiles, but either way a sensation of calm, like I experienced at the foot of the kapok tree, washes through me, erasing the last of my festering doubts and granting me a profound mental clarity.

"Here, wanderer, is a choice to be made," the snake continues in a strangely feminine voice. "There are two paths which venture here: the one which brought you, and the one which will take you away. All that lies before you is a question, and it is yours. Has it been answered?"

This winged snake has lost me; I don't know what question it is referring to, or even if I had a question in the first place.

"Within here is the answer to that which you seek, but ware, for not all within may be to your liking. Enter only if you cannot find the answer within yourself. Know that if you choose to enter, you will not be returned the same. Whatever your decision, be at peace."

Its final words echo as a hiss as the great serpent slithers into light of the pyramid. I watch it go with a feeling of sadness. The pyramid stands before me and I know that I cannot stand here forever. I must either enter it, or return to my corporeal form.

It is the hardest decision I have ever made.

Bright sunlight shines through the canopy above me as I scratch madly at the insect bites covering my arms and neck.

"Itchy?"

I glare at Chino.

"It's what you get for sleeping curled around a kapok tree." He shrugs.

"Thank you for the insight."

He laughs.

"On the topic of insight, how was it?"

"It was…"

I think of the stars and the sky. I think of the jungle and the kapok tree. I think of the winged serpent and the pyramid.

"…enlightening."

"Just like I said."

"Just like you said."

He leans closer, like he means to tell me a secret.

"What did you see?"

What did I see? Fractals, geometric hallucinations, giant ants, talking trees, empty people, vibrant colors, a flying, talking snake, a pyramid of light, and…

"Some things are better left undescribed," I tell him.

"Truth."

We sit in the jungle in silence for a time, each with our own thoughts. The birds chatter high above and the breeze rustles the underbrush around us.

"Did the Spirit of Ayahuasca show you what you needed to see?" Chino asks at length.

I listen to the bird calls for a moment longer, breathe deep the poignant jungle air, and feel the warmth and energy of the scattered sunrays on my face. I think of the serpent's words and I smile.

I am one.

"Yes, I believe she did."

[AN]: Before I get a bunch of reviews telling me that I have run on sentences, let me clarify. I am aware.

I'm trying some unconventional writing techniques. Let me know what you thought.

Also, could you guys let me know what genre you feel this is? Cause I'm struggling to categorize it. Thanks!