You don't always notice when an important chapter in your life begins... it's only much later, in hindsight, that you realize that episode stands apart. So was the case one ordinary night in LA, after my aspiring actress ex-wife, Blaiz had gone to sleep, that I got the idea for a spontaneous road trip the next morning that Blaiz 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-loving spirit but already broken heart when she became my roommate at my 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 more 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. A few hours later we were hiking through the forest up a mountain, lightly arguing about which path was the right way. But soon enough, we found a lovely opening by a forest 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 plump cheek while she looks at the floor and we say our vows.

Back to Yosemite: We're maybe an hour into the trip (because I can't remember what happened before). I place my hand on the cold, stony ground, but it's not just a rock I'm touching — but the whole world and everyone on 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 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 the cliff. I go to 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. Such a simple observation, but she starts to cry, because she knows I'm normally colorblind.

I can't properly see green most of the time, it just looks brown or gray. Once while high in the kitchen, I stopped dead in my tracks after passing by a plant for the thousandth time, and first saw its colour. 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 noticed or complimented her eyes before, not because I took them for granted, but because I couldn't see them. Maybe until that moment 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. Why would we?

Now it's a bit later in the trip, I'm starting to come out of it. Blaiz is smiling on a ledge above me. She references something, but I don't understand what she's talking about, and her heart breaks in front of my eyes. She 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’ve remembered this was inevitable, the trip is ending.

A short while later, we're driving home under the orange autumn leaves and I tell Blaiz that was 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.