Sometimes, we thought back to freshman year and laughed a lot. We laughed at how we never drank, we laughed at how we whispered scandal when Ziggy smoked up or offered us brownies. Once, he’d even offered me ten dollars if I ate just one piece from his pot-infused pan of dark, moist brownies. I’d been tempted because it looked so tasty, but had declined because it was laced with a drug and drugs were a gateway into an inescapable life of addiction-addled failure and misery.

When the munchies arrived, we headed to one of those roads that is a Springfield, a fixture throughout America. It’s lined with gas stations and drive-thru windows—golden arches and neon Stetsons, a grinning hedgehog and Colonel Sanders. Broken Waffle House signs set the skyline and we spoke to metallic voices that sent our confused highs reeling into different worlds.

Hot paper bags of food in hand, we began the drive back home. We took a shortcut through the moneyed prettiness of Upper Arlington. The houses were big and brick and there were lush green breaks of colour—festive firs and hedge maple and hornbeams. It started to snow. We passed a church, more brick and stone houses, and I saw wreaths on doors. It looked like Christmas; it felt like childhood and home. I had lived this place before I ever lived here, and I felt warm, cocooned, connected.

That night, I am the kind of happy that is happiness just because it is; not excited about anything, not triumphant or relieved or grateful. Just happy, just plain happy. It is a very filling feeling. I feel full, like I am settled into leather, like my feet are dangling on cool marble and there are oozing eclairs and tandoori fries in the offi ng.

Eventually, we even tried to grow our own marijuana in Thomas’s closet, with a heat lamp and frequent visits from smoking buddies who would take ponderous looks at the dying plant and prescribe a sure-shot remedy for curing it. In our desperation to save our plant-baby, whom we had christened Peggy Sue, we employed these remedies, every one of them. We changed the soil, turned down the heat and turned up the heat, sprinkled it with bong water and crushed multivitamins over it. Peggy Sue finally withered to a brown crisp, and we extricated what little we could from her and sadly smoked that while ruining Elton John classics.

Goodbye, Peggy Sue
Though we barely got to smoke you at all
You were our child but we failed to raise you
Into a leafy green adult.

And it seems to us, you lived your life
Like a stoner without weed
Never growing into a full plant
Even when it rained multivitamins
And your twigs and remains will always stay
In the back of Tommy’s closet
Your weedy-ness burned out long before
This damn heat lamp ever will.

Bent

December 2010