My friend has baked some cookies. I know this friend’s drug tolerance borders on the absurd, so I eat little more than one crumbly square inch of cookie. It tastes vaguely of peanut butter, mostly of marijuana.
Friend 1 eats half a cookie and Friend 2, who has baked them, maybe three times that.
The first half hour is good. Friend 1 and I order food on the computer, laughing at our ineptitude.
Then things start to ramp up. Basic functions are becoming difficult. Friend 2 is lying on his back on the floor and already feeling sick – by his own admission way, way too high.
Soon after, Friend 1 vomits in the toilet and goes to another room to pass out, his face white like a ghost. (He’s the lucky one.)
Meanwhile I can feel the high slowly increasing in its intensity, like the heaviest possible blanket of snow settling down on my consciousness and suffocating my rational faculties.
Little normal function remains as my brain has been stuffed full of cotton balls. I can do little more than stare directly ahead – then it starts to get dark.
My internal dialogue, which normally ranges from a mild annoyance to an unremarkable aspect of everyday life, is now completely overpowering as I am hammered over the head repeatedly with my own thoughts.
My mind is full to the brim, physically overflowing with rabid thinking. I am being bludgeoned by thoughts – beaten down unmercifully by the thundering voices in my head.
I look at the clock. 8:13. My mind reads me a long dissertation, loudly. I look again. 8:14.
Oh Lord. Time slows to a crawl. Seconds stretch like hours.
I am not having fun. The thoughts, already unpleasant, now turn particularly sour.
I’m staying with two friends I used to live with. This fact conveniently escapes my mind as I imagine them to be two gay lovers – a couple in whose well-kept home I am now an unwelcome intruder.
I look over at my stuff in the corner of the room – a jumbled mess piled on top and around an open suitcase.
I shouldn’t be staying here, I want to say to Friend 2. I feel awful imposing myself on your clean and neat and gay home.
But the suffocating blanket of the high – maybe thankfully in this case – is so strong that I can’t even speak.
The fact that we are all friends, that they are not gay, that we used to live together and that I am a welcome guest – all this and more has escaped my mind as I am plunged deeper and deeper into delusion and paranoia.
I sit inactive for the rest of the night as the world happens around me. I try to act as normal as possible and have no idea of how well I’m doing.
Finally, eventually, after what seems like hours and hours, everyone goes to bed and I fall asleep too.
The next day we are useless human beings. Normally energetic, enthusiastic and productive members of society, Friend 2 and I are reduced to the most basic of human function.
The only exception is Friend 1, who was lucky enough to throw the stuff up the night before.
I’ve not consumed edibles since, and I’m not sure I will again. Just way too fucking high.
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