best day ever

⊕published in Issue 01: "Salad Days" of arkcore zine, April 2023

One morning I woke up to my neighbour playing some kind of chill piano music and I could hear it through the open window. It was sunny outside, and I was enjoying the sun in bed, with the pleasant thought of that half-joint waiting for me in the ashtray. I spent about an hour in bed on different dating apps, mindlessly scrolling through profiles, looking for mustaches to be impressed by.

I put the rusty moka pot on the gas burner, and couldn’t wait for the caffeine and weed to work against each other in my system. Back in bed, I felt like I was in my element – smoking my cigarette sized joints, while reading and drinking coffee. Felt strangely untouchable in light of the many responsibilities I was running from.

The mix of caffeine and weed and very little food worked well for me these days – it would get me just high enough to enjoy the literature and poems I was trying to get through, but not so much that I couldn’t do anything. This had become my new routine, and I was trying to look at my old laptop as little as possible, except when there was a new episode of my show. I felt artsy in a way I hadn’t felt in a very long time – hiding in my room, and using my high ground to create some kind of middle state between artist and consumer.

During this time I had grown very fond of my own company and enjoyed my lonely bubbles, occasionally burst by my flatmate's easygoing presence. We would smoke cigarettes in the kitchen and share anecdotes and idle musings. The apartment was just big enough for the two of us and I enjoyed living so close together. We would sometimes go out for beers or food and have the same chats as in the kitchen. It felt like we had always known each other, and that she was my best friend, although I knew I wasn’t hers.

It often seemed to me that the people I surrounded myself with on a daily basis were able to reach a level of conversation I could only dream of. A friend called this a “native speaker interaction” and I immediately understood what he meant. With English as a second language, I can only but try to follow the conversation and think of suboptimal sentences I could contribute with, but only way too late. This has happened to me a lot, and I always wonder if I seem stupid and/or mysterious when I don’t participate in these interactions, but rather sit in silence, with a facial expression that is either a bit too invested, or completely zoned out. I always hope it’s somewhere in the middle.

My flatmate had one of these conversations with a guy I had brought home, and I felt inadequate in a way that made my stomach ache. Not that it was her fault – I just felt slightly out of place. Being high makes me very socially aware, and I think I prefer to be high on my own, something I was doing a lot during this time.

I was trying to squeeze my brain for any kind of artistic product to come out. Reading books helped with inspiration. I remember feeling meta – reading about other people reading and getting high. Felt one with the books somehow, and wanted to read more, and get even higher, if only to maintain this symbiosis, to stay in this little bubble forever. My flatmate tried to convince me that it was better to burst it, before I got too comfortable with doing nothing. Easy for her to say, I thought, she has a job and gets out every day.

I had taken time off my previous commitment a month earlier than I was supposed to. A medium-long trip around Europe with a friend had been planned, and it even looked like it was actually going to happen. One and a half weeks earlier I had met someone on a dating app, and I thought of extending my trip to pay him a visit, if I could gather the courage and invite myself. I thought he was my soulmate.

I had so far spent a lot of my time rolling joints and indulging in the occasional cocaine. The drugs rarely inspired me to do anything other than snog some stranger, but recently the weed had such a pleasant effect that I couldn’t keep my fingers still. The thought of having months of summer and writing ahead of me was both great and a little scary.

Sitting in the blue kitchen, smoking a cigarette, the thoughts of several previous lovers crossed my mind many times, and I was trying to wave them away. It didn’t work.

I was soon going to run out of weed, for I had been smoking more than usual. The trip to replenish seemed unmanageable, but I knew it was essential to keep up this languid state of affairs. Unknown and unnamed specters loomed in the far distance, questions I hadn’t had the courage to ask myself yet. Life could not continue like this forever.

But the sun was streaming in, and I was having a perfect day.