The Letter E

My relationship with drugs is a strange emotional tangle. I want to understand it, but most days it's a mystery even to me. I keep inspecting the threads, and sometimes I manage to pull one or two out of the knot, and it gets a little smaller. I'm not really sure who dropped the ball of yarn down the stairs, or when, but eventually I will get it all organized. Maybe if I lay out the extant thoughts, it will encourage more. This may be a lot of disorganized rambling, but if so, it would mirror what's in my head on this subject with fair accuracy.

I've already gone over my family history with alcohol. I'm sure that plays a part, but it confuses me that I get far more uptight about drugs than I do about drinking. (When I say "drugs," I'm referencing the recreational use of any non-alcoholic substance, legal or illegal.) Logic would have me with an emotional trigger against alcohol...but no. I've been drinking for years, and I understand it. As long as I and the people around me are using alcohol responsibly, I'm supremely unconcerned about it.

I'm touchy, however, about any other substance. My reactions are part, "I don't understand [empathetically speaking]," part, "Why would you do that?"

I believe that people should be able to do what they want to their own bodies, and at the same time I feel a deep concern about people who want to be high, that gets voiced as, "Aren't you satisfied with the world we've got here? It's amazing! Just look around."

My personal history with drug use is very limited. The first time I tried smoking pot, I was 19, and it did nothing for me. I got some amusement out of watching my friend Mario talk about how pretty the snow was. I tried again a few months later, with a coworker from a strip club, and nothing happened then either, except that I got exceptionally angry about something stupid a couple of hours later, and my then-boyfriend told me it was probably a side effect.

I tried again at 21, on the trip to visit Alejandra that ended up so awkwardly, and got another load of absolutely nothing. At that point I decided that pot was obviously not for me, and pretty much forgot about it. Kevin and I developed a habit of leaving parties when people went to go smoke. It was usually late enough that we had had our good party time anyway, and we were usually the only ones not interested. It was never a "stomp off in a huff" kind of leaving; just an, "Oh, it's that time, I guess we'll go home." The habit stuck with me after I got rid of Kevin.

My next experience was being offered a smoke by Aiden and Shelby when we first got together. I've already gone over that story, so I won't rehash it.

In the category of harder drugs, my experience is even less. Kevin was addicted to a whole lot of things when he was in his teens and twenties, both prescription and non-, and he told me stories about some of the awful things that had happened. By the time we met, he'd been clean for quite a few years, and was proud of that fact. When Aiden came into my life the first time and my relationship with Kevin fell apart, Kevin suggested giving me E as a way of putting it back together.

I wasn't pleased with that suggestion. In fact, it disturbed me deeply, for several reasons. The biggest was that he thought drugs were an okay way to address a relationship problem. The second is that he wasn't going to do the E himself; he was just going to feed it to me. I felt like he was trying to activate sort of cheat code in my brain, to reprogram me to be infatuated with him because he was desperately unsatisfied with reality.

The third issue was that his own experience with E had been a bad one, landing him in an ice bath in the emergency room. When I asked him if that might happen to me, he theorized that because I have weird issues controlling my body temperature anyway, there was a pretty good chance it would.

I took that combination of factors to mean that he was okay with potentially killing me if it meant I might fall in love with him again. False love, mind you. Drug-induced "love," that he assured me would be permanent.

I didn't take the E.

I'd read descriptions of good E trips that sounded like fun, and I'd had enough interest previously to have written a novel based on the results of an unintended E trip. (They say to write what you know, and clearly research was needed.) But after that stupidity, I just put the interest away in a box, along with a few other things I had to accept that I'd never do as long as I stayed with Kevin. (Among the other contents of that box: fuck a hot guy. I distinctly remember the day I sighed and gave up on that one. God I'm glad I took the lid back off my box...)

When Aiden and I were back together again, I remembered that he used to do E. I considered asking about it, then told myself that was a dumb idea if I'd ever had one. We were adults, and I should damn well act like one, not like someone who never grew beyond high school.

One night I activated the Power of Drunk Texting, and thoroughly confused Aiden by asking him something like, "Do you still do the things you used to do?"

He asked me the next morning what I meant, and I winced and told him not to worry about it. Maybe I even claimed I couldn't remember what I meant. But somehow, eventually, it came out that I had been referring to E, and I admitted that I was interested. He said they had something whose street name I no longer remember, but somehow I memorized the chemical: 2,5-dimethoxyphenethylamine. (I got serious about doing my research.) We never did do whatever that was, but one day he asked if my interest extended to "other things." I said please don't hint around, just specify, and he specified acid.

I thought about it and said why not. Shelby asked me during a car ride whether I really wanted to do it or whether I was letting him push me around, and I assured her that I wouldn't let anyone push me around on that particular subject. I was grateful for her check-in.

On a lazy afternoon, we dropped the acid. I baked cookies while we waited for it to hit. We played with a hula hoop. We drank some wine. Nothing happened. Long story short, the doses weren't as strong as Aiden thought they were, and we ended up taking three hits each. Everything was hysterically funny, and I couldn't go to sleep when I was tired...and that's about it. The most spectacular feature was the boredom. I didn't see any dragons, and I finally got to sleep around 5am, mildly annoyed that it couldn't have been earlier.

At some point during the long night, Aiden handed me a glass jar full of ice and smoke and told me inhale it. He explained to my confused look that the ice cools off the smoke so it doesn't burn. I did as he told me, and succeeded only in reminding myself just how disgusting pot smells and tastes. Yuck. Why do people do this again?

A few months after that, there was the Meltdown. Two months further along, I agreed to be a supplier for my mom to ease the suffering brought on by the chemo, then deeply questioned myself for a couple of days. Shelby finally pointed out that I was mixing up the medical and recreational use camps, and I felt much better after that.

Caught up to last weekend, Aiden had procured some E. Shelby and I came home from an afternoon of brewing mead with Eben, and within five minutes of walking in the door, Aiden said to me, "You know what I think we should do tonight? We should roll."

That term was new to me, but I figured it out from context. I didn't say yes or no. When Shelby came downstairs, he said the same thing to her. We sat and ate dinner in relative silence, while a ping-pong ball careened around in my head, knocking against the inside of my skull. Yes, no, yes, no, what the hell, I wasn't prepared for this!

When we finished eating, Aiden went upstairs, and Shelby checked in. "No," I said, knowing that I was a level of freaked out that would lead to bad things. She nodded and said she had sensed that.

Aiden returned with a bottle and said, "So, shall we roll?"

"No," Shelby and I answered in unison, and he looked slightly taken aback, but said that was fine. He said that today had seemed like a good day because we didn't have to be anywhere tomorrow, and I said that while theoretically today was fine, springing the idea on me without warning wasn't going to work. The suddenness of the whole thing somehow triggered panic, and I had a moment of needing to prove that I could still control my own situation by saying no. (What am I, two years old?)

That treatise brings me up to date on the logic and events side of things, but doesn't do much to explain the mess in my head. I think I'll have to go a more poetic and less structured route to express that. To be continued...