STEAMPUNK19

Once, when I was around 16, my mom left dinner in the oven with a note for me. She was going to be late. I had the house to myself. My middle sister, was spending the night at her friends. I was perfectly happy by myself. It must have been a winter night, around 8 o’clock or so because I remember that it was dark outside.

The doorbell rang. I opened the door and to my surprise there were a group of people from my high school standing there. I was surprised because I didn’t think I had friends. But with smiles, they asked to come in.

“We’re going to get you high,” one of them said. All four of them were smiling. They showed me a bag of Marijuana. They picked through it and filled the pipe.

What was I supposed to do? I was scared to death. In the back of my house – was a small yard with false green carpet grass. Wooden benches surrounding the square grass-carpet were holding up the border of a wooden canopy.

Sitting on one side of the bench, one of them lit the pipe and told me to inhale. I had never even smoked cigarettes before. I coughed. I coughed and coughed. I tried inhaling approximately 6 or 7 times. But I felt nothing. I can still smell the way marijuana smells.

What a farce I became. I BARELY graduated from high school. I smoked a lot of pot since that first time. I chased bud. My parents (at one time) who dreamed big for me – who beamed that I began to read by the age of 3, and thought I was an artistic and a liberal genius, must have been really disappointed about my decisions. They saw me bang my head against the wall, with endless struggles that left a blood stain. I wonder if chasing pot caused serious side effects when stoned as much as I was.

However, I knew I was doing something wrong and the act itself was thrilling. The chase was thrilling. My new stoner friends were acting stoned at one point and I didn’t think anything was wrong. They were fun. They had a perma-smile that was contagious. They made me feel like I belonged.

Ironically, it was after that epic night when my friends tried to get me stoned; that I began taking care of myself. In high school, once I reached the marijuana high, I needed to bike around to get places. It began to morph into a serious hobby.