You don't always notice when an adventure begins... it's only later in hindsight that you realize that chapter stands apart. So was the case one ordinary night in Los Angeles, after my aspiring actress ex-wife, Blaiz had gone to sleep, that I got the idea for a road trip the next morning that she was cool enough to agree to. Our destination: Northern California’s mountainous Yosemite National Park.

Blaiz was a 19 year old small town girl from Eastern Oregon with a fun personality but already broken heart when she became my roommate at my near coastal Santa Monica apartment in 2011. She couldn't help but keep me permanently aroused with her supple body and swooping lips that seemed to always curve into a smile despite her occasional melancholy. She was initially timid like a kitten, but grew confident under my influence in a few short months.

I was different then — cockier — but still naive enough to answer every question with unfiltered honesty. Maybe that's why she liked me. Once while high, she described me as "strange — but in a cool way."

The next morning we drove up to Yosemite with little more than some snacks and a bag of psilocybin mushrooms that I decided to bring along at the last minute. Several hours later, we were hiking up a mountain through a forest, mildly arguing about which path was the right way. But soon enough, we found a lovely opening by a stream with tiny waterfalls overlooking the valley below. Blaiz had never tripped before and told me afterwards that she'd expected just another giggly afternoon like you get from weed. I was expecting more of an Adam & Eve sex trip, but it turned out that neither of us were really in the mood that day (for once) which is fine — because we might've gotten something even better instead.

Flashback to several months prior: Blaiz and I are alone with an officiant at The Little White Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas. I watch in slow-motion as a tear rolls down her cheek while she looks at the floor and we say our vows.

Back to Yosemite, maybe an hour into the trip: I place my hand on a rock — though it's not just a rock I'm touching — but the whole world and everyone connected to it. I look up and see a deer carcass on the ground a short distance away. Its leg looks delicious, I want to eat it since I'm a mountain lion now and lift my paw from the rock. But it also kinda looks like a woman's leg... maybe I should have sex with her. No wait, it's just a tree log on the ground, and I'm a human. I'm tripping, oh yeah. Where's Blaiz?

She's standing by the edge of a cliff. I go hug her. The wind is swirling around us, gently blowing her hair. I can't believe how pretty she is. We're just two kids on a mountain, for this brief moment in time, and I get to be the one with her. I remark that her eyes are green and she starts to cry because she knows I'm usually colorblind.

I can't really see green unless I'm on drugs — it just looks brown or gray to me. Once while tripping in the kitchen, I stopped dead in my tracks after noticing the true color of a plant that I'd passed a thousand times before. And now here we are, holding each other in some fairytale scene like a movie, realizing that in all our time together, I've never once complimented her eyes, not because I took them for granted, but because I couldn't see them. Maybe until then she'd thought I was just a prick.

There is no more conflict between us — how absurd that we were always competing, fighting about who knows the right way up some random mountain when it's perfectly fine that neither of us do.

Now it's a bit later in the trip. Blaiz is standing on a ledge smiling at me. She says something, but I don't understand what she means, and her smile suddenly breaks. She realizes I'm starting to come out of the trip and thinks I forgot our infinity together — did I even see it?! Her cute face is crying and I'm so sad to have disappointed her. But we knew this was inevitable — the trip is ending.

A short while later, we're driving home under the orange autumn leaves and I tell her that might've been the best day of my life. She's moved by the rare emotion in my voice and belief that my youth has peaked. She reassures me that there'll be better days. But I'm still not sure.