I started practicing.

  Not smart practice. Desperate practice.

  Every spare dollar went into ingredients. Fresh mattered—Dimitri’s notes were clear on that—and fresh cost money. I bought plants from a gardener about to throw them away anyway. Wilted jasmine. Sad thyme. A rose bush that looked like it had already given up.

  I didn’t know how to grow anything.

  Didn’t matter.

  I dragged the pots up onto the fire escape because it was the only place that got sun, and I told myself it was temporary. That I’d figure it out. That I wasn’t completely losing my mind growing herbs outside my apartment like a lunatic.

  I sat there some nights staring at those dying plants, talking to them under my breath like that would help.

  I told myself I was experimenting.

  That’s a lie.

  I was addicted.

  Every failure meant I was closer to understanding why it failed. Every partial success meant it was real. And once something is real, you don’t get to pretend it isn’t just because it’s inconvenient.

  The book called it the Chameleon Effect.

  Not invisibility.

  Context erosion.

  The thing is there. You can touch it. You can trip over it if you know where it is. But the mind refuses to linger. Refuses to catalog. Refuses to care.

  That’s what I was chasing.

  And I was failing at it spectacularly.

  Week one: Nothing worked. I wasted ingredients, burned pots, filled my apartment with smells that made the neighbors knock on my door asking if I was cooking something illegal.

  Week two: Partial success. Objects became “harder to notice” but not unnoticeable. Like your brain had to work a little harder to register them. Not enough.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Week three: My rent went unpaid. Power bill stacked up. Food became a calculation instead of a choice.

  I ate less. Slept worse.

  But the effect got stronger.

  I started taking notes in the margins of Dimitri’s book, arguing with his handwriting, correcting his measurements, refining the process.

  The jasmine had to be bruised, not crushed.

  The thyme needed to be fresh-cut within hours.

  The rose petal—one, always one—had to be torn, not cut.

  And the intent.

  That was the hardest part.

  Because intent isn’t thinking really hard about something.

  Intent is holding one clean image in your head without letting your brain wander, without letting fear or hope or doubt creep in.

  Just the fact.

  This object does not matter.Eyes slide.Mind does not catalog.

  I practiced that more than the brewing itself.

  Sitting in my apartment, staring at a cup, forcing my brain to stop caring about it.

  It sounds stupid.

  It is stupid.

  But it worked.

  By the end of week three, I could make a small object—a cup, a book, a knife—become something your eyes refused to hold onto for more than a second.

  Not gone.

  Just… dismissed.

  And that rush—that moment when I realized I’d done something impossible—was better than any drink, any drug, any woman I’d ever touched.

  It was competence.

  Real, measurable, undeniable competence.

  For the first time in my life, I was good at something that mattered.

  And I wanted more.