Monday, January 22, 2007

"Drugs are bad, mmkay?"

"I don't even know who you are anymore" she said, grabbing my baggie and flying across the room with it. Did she ever really know who I was, or who I thought I was, or even who I wasn't? I was going to say it, but if there's one thing I had learned about my mom up to that point it was that she had a really strong right arm, and that was the one she hit with.
I tried not to roll my eyes, but this scene was so mundane I couldn't stand it. It was exactly the kind of thing I never wanted to happen again in my life. Something familiar.
I could still smell the smoke on my sweater, it's sweetness drifting into my nostrils, distracting me from her invariable rage. And she wondered why I loved it so much, what the draw was, what was so exciting about it.
It gets me away from here. From you.
It helps me sleep mom. It makes me hungry. It makes me forget that I'm however old I am and still share a bed with my mom, share a room with my entire family, that I'm a freshman in high school and I work so many hours at my job that I barely have time to take a shit anymore, forget trying to actually do my schoolwork.
She was waving her hand in front of my face. All that time she was in my face I didn't even see her, didn't feel her.
"What else have you been taking?" she asked, as if she had found aspirin instead of a bag of weed. What do I say? Advil? Midol?
Taking. It's not taking, it's experiencing.
I wanted to say that so bad, but again, the right arm.
It struck me then that she shouldn't be surprised in the least bit. I came home smelling like weed and acting like a stoner everyday of my life and it takes her finding the bag to say something? It didn't seem logical. Nothing did.
She stood there, waving her skinny arms around and yelling but she seemed to just get more quiet the wider her mouth opened. She had an aura, a putrid yellow aura that made me nauseous and the room spun and dipped, like a child imitating a dancer they'd seen on television. Little colored sparks were coming out of her eyes, her fingertips, her frazzled blonde hair.
"Seriously?" I wondered aloud, slowly, before my face met the carpet.

I guess you could say this story has a moral, and I guess you could say that moral would be "sometimes weed isn't just weed. sometimes it's weed with angel dust."
But I'm sure you knew that already.

No comments: