Bill Payments/ Red Dead Purchase

Went to Rogers to pay my cell phone bill, came out with this...

My Journey Pt 7: Backtracking, my first time.

I can remember the first time I smoked pot as if it was yesterday, it was March 2003, my dad had just been diagnosed with cancer and I was at my sister's house with Bryan and his friends, we sat around the kitchen table while her boyfriend lathered a rolling paper from a jug of oil, he then broke up a cigarette, gathered up the tobacco and rolled it into an oil joint. I didn't realize that it was oil joint; I wasn't paying attention to the process I just hauled long and hard on the joint when it came my way. I don't smoke cigarettes so needless to say the smoke hit me like a mother fucker and everyone in the kitchen laughed with wildly, my eyes watered, my chest was on fire, the room started to spin. I thought I was going to puke so I bolted to the washroom just in case. Nothing ended up coming up so I left and went back into the kitchen to see that everyone was now in the living room watching a special about Tank Abbot on pay-per-view. My sister's boyfriend was busy rolling up another joint, this time it was pure pot, they lit it up and we began to pass it around.

My world was turned upside down earlier that week, I can remember the doctor calling our house while my mom was out, I asked if I could take a message and he just asked me if he could get her cell phone number. I blurted the numbers out, hung up the phone and went back to watching television in the living room with Chewi. When she got home a couple of hours later there was a look in her eye, she asked our friend to leave the room, I knew something was up then, because she never asked our friends to leave the room while talking to us. She sat down on the couch in her coat with her purse still slung over her shoulder but resting in your lap.

"The doctor called," she said.

We all knew that he had called, we were waiting on pins and needles about Dad's condition, he went into the hospital with a sore back, they had to run tests and so we had to play an unbearable waiting game.

"You're father has cancer," she said with tears in her eyes. "There's a tumour on his lower back and in his lungs, and they can't operate."

It took a second for that first nail in his coffin to hit home, when someone tells you that the man you have most admired for your entire life is going to die, you want to reject what they say, and you want to push the words away as if not hearing them would make them untrue. A massive lump began in my chest as if someone had knocked the wind out of me, it climbed up through my trachea and tried to escape in a moaning wail, I swallowed the grief down to the deepest pits of my stomach but it surged forth anyway, tears and snot flowed and I howled until my throat was raw. What I remember from that night the most is my friend's shoulder as he held me and let me cry.

Sitting in my sisters living room on the floor just in front of a wooden coffee table and just below their television set I hauled on the joint, it burned my already scorched throat but not as bad as the tobacco, I inhaled again and then once more for good measure. It was the first time I sensed the euphoria associated with weed, I laughed at every little joke, my cheeks hurt and my eyes were pied. A happiness washed over me that I thought would never come again it blocked out that soul wrenching sadness of the horrible news that my father's death loomed just beyond the horizon. I lie down on the floor and let my body and mind do its thing, my legs jerked and hands twitched sending vibrations of colour dancing and twirling just before my eyes.

I went home that night, said a quick I love you to my mom and crawled into my warm bed, all of my sensations heightened to the extreme and when I woke up in the morning, that devouring sadness crashed back into me like raging wave upon a coastline as I remembered that my father was still dying.

Love yourself, be kind to yourself.

J-