Where I come from, growing pot is more common than having an actual job. I learned in middle school to double check when eating baked goods brought in from home because sometimes parents would mix up their treats and send their kid to school with enough special cupcakes to get an entire class of twelve-year-olds high. Somehow, I managed to avoid being a total pothead despite the abundance of marijuana everywhere. I just didn’t care to be one of those people laughing at a paper napkin or double fisting bags of chips. I always said no. I was responsible. I always politely passed the joint without taking a hit, like a fucking lady.
Except one time, of course. The one time that I ate a pot brownie and completely lost my shit. Everyone’s had their one time, right?
We were at the river, just lying in the sun and gossiping like any other summer day. I was with one of my best friends and a few more people who, honestly my memory has blacked out. Someone produced a container of special brownies and asked if we wanted any. I’d been offered a pot brownie about sixteen thousand times in my life before at this point and always said no, as stated earlier.
But these ones looked…different. They were gooey and chocolatey and I distinctly remember pink sprinkles, although that could just be one of my distorted memories of the day. I was honestly just fucking hungry, and it was, well, chocolate.
A little bite won’t hurt, I told myself.
I lied. I had a few bites, but everyone else had more. Someone had a whole brownie. We laid in the sun and relaxed and I shrugged. I didn’t feel anything out of the ordinary. Must have been a weak batch.
We were walking back up the road to the car when I blinked and suddenly saw a shade of green I’d never seen before in my life. I turned in a circle — it was everywhere. Every tree, bush, and leaf was such a deeply intense, bright shade of green that it hurt my eyes. Everything was also sort of spinning. I took a deep breath and felt every particle of air that entered my lungs. Shiiiiiit.
Yup. You guessed it. I’d just eaten three bites of a distinctly potent batch of pot brownies. It was hitting me, and it was hitting me hard.
“What if rocks are like… just all the sand in the world stuck together?”
“What if people were chairs, and chairs sat on us?” Important questions were asked that day.
I was laughing so hard, holding my friend’s little sister’s face that tears were rolling down our cheeks, but we had no idea why. We got to a friend’s house and I spent thirty minutes looking for a spoon to eat ice cream, forgetting what I was doing, and sitting back down on the couch. I remember someone who couldn’t stop touching the carpet and asking if it was magic. Shit was not under control.
Eventually though, we started to freak out. We were so high, beyond high, so high we were seeing sounds, and we couldn’t escape it.
“We’re going to be high forever,” said my best friend, who had been staring at the bedroom wall for half an hour. “And then we’re going to die.”
I nodded slowly. I knew she was right. We would surely die like this, permanently blazed. It was fucking terrifying.
Luckily, we did eventually come down from it. I wore aviators into my parents’ house and ran face-first into a wall, but I pulled it off. And in a few more painful hours, we were all okay. Those hours that I spent literally out of my mind, though, stayed with me forever. Now, when someone asks if I want a pot brownie, I just say no, but with good reason. I’ve been there, I’ve seen the shades of impossible green, and I’m not looking to duplicate the experience.
Unless, of course, there are pink sprinkles involved..
Image via Shutterstock
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Shannon Layne
My favorite things are tiaras, compliments, and free drinks, which are becoming harder to come by the more I tend to show up at the bar in sweat pants. The proudest moment of my life so far has been landing an actual, paying job that allows me to Facebook stalk people for a living. I tweet about my mom way too often, who is constantly trying to remind me that I'm not nearly as cool as I think I am. Please send me funny stories to read at work here: [email protected]
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