My First Time Smoking Weed

BY JAKE LISABETH

All of it starts how anything starts and you’re a little kid and then you’re an older dude. you find a trail behind your old school and you’re with two friends who are also lacking the marijuana experience and you smoke some out of a “bowl” which looking back on it now was just the chillum to this kid’s older brother’s bong but it worked real well and you walk to this girl’s house for her birthday party and it’s the longest walk ever but by far the most interesting walk you’ve ever had in your life. the grass looks fake the sun is some other worldly warm, the trees look rounded like they were inside of a snow globe and you ask yourself, what the fuck did I smoke? but you really just got high like really high for the first time. summer turns into autumn and you renew a friendship with a dude you loved hanging with in elementary school and you both smoke weed and you both fucking love the mischief and adventure of sneaking through homes, behind the movie theatre, through the woods, up the hill, past the fields, past the parents. it’s fun. and no one else we hung out with smoked or even thought about the act of smoking but it didn’t matter unfortunately for them it just meant that they were not as cool as the two of us. you make games out of getting high. you smoke two bowls at the top of a public golf course and shake each other’s hands on a job well done while gray people on carts drive in the hazy distance looking like plastic toy pieces or a cartoon. you make your way through your junior year in your small high school. you find yourself sitting in class feeling absolutely sick with all the bullshit. you are trying to follow the conventions of a well to do community and take your AP and honors courses and ace them while high-fiving a teacher and nailing your SAT test while snoring in the back of a drivers ed class every tuesday and friday. you get recommended tutors, you have an academic counselor who tells you that you probably can’t get into most of the colleges you just mentioned and you maybe possibly could get into these following universities which you have no interest in attending. and sometimes you’re told something stronger than every piece of standardized high school horse shit. sometimes you wonder where your dads been going, and you’re eventually sat down by your mom and your dad and he tells you that he’s an addict and he’s been at narcotics anonymous meetings and you’re stomach feels emptier than it ever has and you wanna talk to everyone that matters and no one at the same exact time. and you go to sleep with a chemistry test in the morning.

And somehow, that has to become the only thing to think about. It has to be because thinking about anything else would just be too damn much. And then weeks pass and tests are taken and girls are flirted with and you’re still smoking with your friend. especially on the weekends. and you meet these two girls and one has her drivers license along with a car and you start driving around with them and you ditch your main group of friends for this fearsome foursome all the fucking time. and you introduce them to the fabled greenery and you all laugh hysterically and play with dogs and have a religious moment with mac n’cheese in a communal pot and you scare one girl’s sister by being an accidental goon and you watch Saturday Night Live and pretend like it was funnier than it was. and hormones come into play and your friend gets with one of the girls and you get with one of the girls and things start moving fast but not for me but I was alright with that and you keep smoking a bowl on a wintery beach and sometimes you think about your mom and your dad and you get sad. maybe you feel guilty. maybe you’re angry. it doesn’t matter because right now your mind is clouded in a deep white fog. the winter seems forever to you and snow keeps falling and ice is the first layer on every surface and you try going outside to smoke one time and woah did your mom really just call you out on it and make you stay inside? and did you really tell her that you weren’t going outside to get high? sometimes at night you use all the maturity you have to really think about your life and your actions and you come to the revelation that no fucking duh drugs are a sensitive issue in the house. and that makes you think you wanna tone it down with the weed. and you talk with your friend and you both agree that something had happened which made you both enjoy getting high a little less.

It was bringing you down and making you sad and paranoid and it took you a very long winter to realize. You watch the snow melt and shave your awkward half goatee and start hanging with everyone again and you’re smoking less and you ask that very girl you used to watch Saturday Night Live with to prom and she says yes and you know it will never go anywhere but it was nice having a date. You start getting early dinners at a sushi place just you and your dad. and you feel really big. You feel like you’ve grown up and the fact that you and him both brought your own secrets to the table wasn’t scary, it was humbling. You tell yourself that forgiveness is not a one way street and that in order to feel good about yourself you need to feel good about others and in order to feel good about others you have to feel good about yourself. And love is real and you learned to love a little stronger. Your year, it ends with many test results, more concrete ideas of your future, and a summer job as a camp counselor on its way. And so many crazy and definitive parts of your life haven’t even happened yet. You’ll sometimes look back on that time when you were a junior in high school and you started smoking weed as the world changed and you’ll be so shocked. You’ll be beautifully intrigued, by just how much one can reveal to themselves, while still having way too much left to see.