DOSE:

1.4 g

smoked

Cannabis

(plant material)

BODY WEIGHT:

58 kg

This is my third time burning, and we're in Benny's car, waiting for Nick and Sam to arrive with the weed. When they finally arrive, John scoots next to me in the middle to make room for Nick. He passes the bag to John and tells him to start grinding. The smell is pungent in the air and I drink it in--the way it mixes with John's cologne brings back good times. It's always grossed me out a little how he eats the leftover bits raw. He sprinkles the grounds into the paper Nick holds, and all of us rag him for spilling. It's nearly midnight and Benny turns off the car light and turns on his iPod to watch a movie. Nick holds up two joints for all to see, lights up and passes one on to John, and then to me--it doesn't burn it's way down my throat last time, but maybe that's because of all the cigs.

Everyone's taking two hits so I do the same before passing it on to Benny in the front seat, who then offers it to Michael, who declines. Pretty soon the car morphs into a very good hotbox--John turns to me and asks if I'm high yet, I don't know, it always hits me slow. So he laughs and a few minutes later I feel it, and I feel it good. I knew I was blasted when Sam--in the very back of the car--leaned over the back seat to talk to John and he turned into a white, Voldenmort-like devil in my peripheral vision. The joints were still being passed along and John was patient and gave me tips before I had the chance to screw up.

My eyes move real slow--like when I'm drunk, except that everything has a weird view to it, like I'm looking through a bubble out into the world, and the edges are blurred. I'm studying everyone, paying little attention to Michael, which is odd, because he was most of the reason for me joining this little excursion in the first place. I was still depressed from when he broke up with me the week before and I needed to 'sort out' all of the feelings pent up inside before I drove myself mad from running in metaphorical circles. And I needed to figure out how to not feel so awkward around him, and this seemed like a good path to try out.

The dark is nice and everyone hisses and rags on whoever turned on the car light, but we all quiet when the pipe comes out, a little blown-glass thing with green stripes. Again, Nick started, the light went out, and we all went back to breathing in the hotboxed fumes. My eyes were glued to John, studying the way he used the pipe--I'd never used one before. But, like before, he was patient and lit it for me and walked me through it.

I let go of my breath and watched the smoke meld with the rest of the atmosphere. I lean forward and try to focus on Michael, on what I wanted to accomplish regarding him, but I just can't care. Here's another thing: my attention span shrinks to about fifteen seconds, and everything has a meaning and a wonder, but none of it it worth pondering, if that makes sense.

I look at my hands--they really are huge. A giggle escapes, a dry, high sound. They don't look huge, perse, only feel huge. Like my nerves had stretched out about six inches from my body. I lean in to touch John's face and find that I can feel him without any physical contact. The sensation was like to touching your foot when it falls asleep--that feathery caress that leaves you in a dull, numb ache. But as soon as too much pressure is applied, the feeling goes away, leaving you unsatiated. When my hand lay against his cheek, the 'aura' left until I pull away. John announces to the group that I'm officially blasted. I say nothing--there's no need to.

I trick my eyes into seeing things in the shadows, scaring myself and revelling in it. Briefly I wonder at how my pulse is doing, but I can't feel it in my chest--it's found a home between my ears. I 'touch' everything, feel the people around me even though I don't reach out, recoilling from Nick (who's always made me nervous) and ignoring Michael. John finishes his hit and looks into the bowl, laughing a little. It's almost ash. He asks Benny (who's next after me) if it's chill that I finish it off, and with the okay, I take the last hit. My lips leave the hot glass and I taste ash in my mouth--John holds it up to me, giggling about how I completely ashed it. He puts it away and when he looks at me again I tug on one of his dreads, feeling the carpet texture scratch my fingertips lightly--almost teasingly.

Every now and then we bump our foreheads together, staring at eachother until one of us grins and breaks the connection. I'm concentrating on tricking my eyes, and then on keeping my mouth shut so I don't accidentally drool. I can no longer multitask, everything is separate. I have to make my eyes adjust and move instead of letting them roam free--I can only feel one body part at a time. Hands or thighs or lips or eyelids. Everything becomes singular.

When the car revs to life, I panic. Benny was going to drive stoned--totally blasted. My voice finds its way past my teeth and I say no over and over again, telling him that we would get caught if he drove, that it was stupid. And somewhere in my gut I knew that this would happen--something like this would go down. We stank of weed, none of us were in our right minds, smoke billowed out of the windows. John and Michael tell me to relax, that I'm being irrational. I think the only thing that gets me to stop flipping out is Michael's assurance that Benny was one of the best stoned drivers he'd ever seen. When the car moves down to the stop sign, I put my hands over my face and lay down, head resting next to John's thigh and eyes shut tight. He leans down and asks if I'm okay and am I having a bad trip? My answer comes out strangled and tight. No, I am not okay.

I'm scared out of my wits, shivering from the cold of the wind and John tells Benny to roll them up, but I'm still frozen. I can feel my nerves stretching out to find warmth, latching onto John and leeching the body heat away from him. My body is numb but I know it's cold, because I can feel the trembles emmanating from it, pulsing thorugh those metaphysical nerves. Where John's body heat reaches is hot, but it stays only where it hits and goes no further.

Every so often one of them talks, and when Michael's clear, lazy voice inquires as to my state of consiousness. 'She's out,' comes the confident, lyrical cadence of John himself. 'Wow, she just freaked and passed out.'

This statement is only half-true. I am awake enough to hear them and differentiate between the their voices, but not quite so much as to get up and prove them wrong. Besides, I add, if I got up I'd probably act even more suspicious, so this is the smarter thing to do. So I content myself with watching the patterns inside my head--the wavy lines of blue and green and purple and yellow on the sea of black. The skin-toned circles that signify where the heat is located in a triangular pattern, with dark lines making out my head and his thigh, separating the triangle into two different shades of skin--light and dark.

The car turns into Michael's driveway, and when he gets out, he decides that they would have to wait another day to get the four nugs he offered to Benny and John--there was no way he could get in and out of the house undetected. The door closes, Benny turns the car around and after a minute he notices that he needs gas. This scares the bejesus out of me, because we were already cutting it close enough as it is.

The whole time, I'm laying there, and now my body is lightly spasming away because I manage to work my way up to a panic attack. When we stop my mouth is dry. Then comes a deep, authoritative voice: 'Mind stepping out of the car, please, sir?'

Benny giggles and I could see the cop's large nose through my eyelids. He begins to open the door and then remembers to shut off the car, saying 'whoopsies' and turning it on and off again, laughing at the noise. My heart pounds loud in my ears and I go all tense and shaky, filled with so many different emotions--panic overriding them all. The muscle is pulling at the constraints of my sternum, trying to fight its way out.

Breathing is hard, I'm shaking uncontrollably. I should call for help, because the vision behind my lids is greying, the lines and circles loosing their tint until my mind is empty except for one thought: I'm caught. I've disappointed my mother, what will I tell her? And then I realize that I really can't breathe--it's not coming to me. I want to scream so that I can get help and not go down in the stats as another OD--get a tube pushed down my throat to force the oxygen in. But I don't, and as the cold feeling of dread spreads steadily, building the pressure like a crucible, death stares me plain in the face.

I curl my body inwards and briefly wonder if that's why I was so numb. Everything is overpowering--the heavy silence, crushing atmosphere and terrifying prospect of dying. Then it all makes sense, why I can never fully envision myself with a future, how it all blurs when I think too far into the future--I had none. This was the end of the line, so to speak, and I wouldn't even be remembered as anything more than hurt. Guilt built up, about how this would affect my mother, how disappointed she would feel to know that her pride and joy had screwed up royally, and how she would blame herself for it.

These are the worst moments of my life.

John's thigh is still there, and a little logic makes its way through the fog of my mind. If there really is a cop, John would be outside with Benny. I would have been noticed immediately. It's him that acts as an anchor to reality, gradually pulling me back into rationality. Then I hear Benny's voice again, happy as ever, the crackle of a candy wrapper sparking through my thoughts. John reaches over to get it and they eat in relative silence while I focus on slowing down my heart. As I work up the willpower necessary to move I squeeze my eyes shut, making sure that I still had some control over my body--I don't believe that I do until I feel the two lids rub against eachother. Then I brace myself and pull away from the leather upholstery, staring lamely at a spot on the floor while I convince myself that there is no cop.

John asks if I'm okay, but I don't respond--there's no need to, no hurry, no care. He repeats himself, and Benny backs him up, but I lift a finger to signal that I heard them, I was just getting my bearings back. There was a dampness just below my eyes and I wiped at it, amazed that I had cried without noticing it. But when I look over my shoulder, that dread comes back full force as I realize we haven't even left the gas station yet. What felt like eternity was really only a few minutes. My brain can't take the conflicting logics and with a prominent 'Oh, fuck' I crash back down to the seat to wait out the rest of the ride to John's house--there is no way I'm going home state I'm in.

When the car stops the second time it isn't surrounded by bright flourescent lights--it's dark and cool and quiet. Benny turns around and I feel their gazes on me, and Benny laughs and remarks on my eyes, so I squeeze them shut and make a mental inventory of my vanity: am I drooling? Are my eyes going wayward? Are there creases on my face from the seat? Is my hair sticking up? When I decide that I am as presentable as one in my position can be, I let John coax me into getting up with promises of a warm house and soft couch to sleep on instead of the car's interior. It works and I fiddle with the door handle until it opens and I undo the seatbelt and slide out, bracing myself with the side of the car. I walk with Benny and he teases me about my stumbling, zig-zagging walking patterns, even though the ground is solid and straight beneath my feet. He fools me into believing him until I figure out that he's messing with me, and them I go to John instead.

He reminds Benny and I that we have to be quiet since he wasn't supposed to have people over and goes in first to make sure it's all clear. When he nods we follow, and I notice how nice it is--matching couches, entertainment center, flat-screen TV, and weights. I catch a glimpse of myself in a mirror and see bloodshot eyes and only slightly tousled hair. The table in the living room isn't bad, either, but we don't go there, because that's just asking to get caught. John tells Benny to sit when he tries to follow him into the kitchen, and after a quick-whispered squabble, Benny sits on the small couch. I let out the breath I'd been holding and relax when they work it out grinning--controversy makes me nervous, and we'd all be in deep trouble if we got caught now.

John comes back with a box of Coco Puffs, which look fairly sickening, and puts on Airplane. He dumps a blanket in my lap and they go outside, and--aside from the nagging paranoia of getting caught (again)--there is peace. I feel a tug on my bladder, but I don't know where the bathroom is and can't walk straight anyway, so I decide to deal with it in the morning. In the flickering light of Airplane I play with shapes and shadows, making figures that scare me and designs that I can see, but only in the very back of my mind. Like an idea, I can only see them for what they are if I don't look directly at them. Maybe they're just shy, lingering at the peripherals of my thoughts.

When I remember my promise I contemplate the floral pattern of the blanket, smiling when I realize it looks almost exactly like the blanket I get at every house I sleep over at. Deciding that I can't balance with the blanket, I leave it on the chair and curl up on the small couch, back to the television. While I drift off Airplane plays in the background, later interrupted by the click of the front door and Benny and John's quiet voices as they tiptoe back inside. They watch the movie a bit longer before it goes off, the patterns the light was making against the back of the couch fading in the darkness, roiling there in the shadows before flickering out of existence. The hall light goes off and I listen to them rustle around in the darkness, paying attention to the tune the random noises made.

It must have been a couple of hours, because I'm stiff and aching. I push myself into a sitting position and press the heels of my hands into my eyes. The hall light is back on and I assume John has the munchies or ran to the bathroom, so I let my eyes wander. Benny is on the carpet, half-covered by a blue comforter, and John is fast asleep on the couch. He has the blanket I left on the chair, his face covered with it, unruly hair poking out the top. I notice how much taller and leaner he looks laying out like that, all open and stretched end-to-end of the green sofa. In the reflection of the television screen I see a man with long gray hair and an orange shirt sitting at a table. The colors aren't moving so I guess I've come down. My heartbeat quickens and I lay back down, and within minutes I'm half-asleep again.

I was up first the next morning, though I guess that's to be expected, since I never really slept. I watch Benny sleep, the way his nose twitches and his mouth sags just slightly. John is even more fascinating, and when he turns facing me it seems like he knew someone was watching, because his eyes open. He turns around, looks to the hall, and then at me with such open confidence and lazy nonchalance that I have to avert my gaze--almost like he knew that I'd be watching him, like he was waiting for me to figure it out instead of vice versa. I prod Benny until he wakes and then we leave to air out the car. The sweet, heedy smell of pot hangs heavy everywhere--in our clothes, our hair, my hands. The car can't compare with this eye-rolling scent absorbed into my very sweat and skin.

I don't get the spiritual enlightenment or emotional clarity I was looking for, but I feel better--more at ease. When I have the chance to do this again, there will be no driving. I asked them about the cop, just to make sure it was a hallucination/dream, and it turns out it was--all caused by a Sublime song, apparently.

Exp Year: 2007	ExpID: 62729
Gender: Female
Age at time of experience: Not Given
Published: Jun 4, 2007	Views: 25,910
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