Draft Two of Personal Narrative

Warning: Drug use and explicit language

Imagine a wooden table. Your standard wooden table with four wooden legs and a rectangular wooden tabletop, about knee height. The Table is part of a set of army surplus decorations for Northgate Apartment C-202, a sparsely decorated apartment permanently stuck in the 1970’s. My freshman year the Table sat in the apartment of a Junior named Drew. I practically worshipped Drew and he opened my eyes to the world of cannabis. He became a sort of older brother figure to me and guided my transformation from naivety to “hoodrat”-dum. Drew was the first person in my life to use the Table; I never would have expected to see it again after he left Ole Miss.

Over a period of two years this Table occupied a central role in my drug-fueled adventures at the University of Mississippi. Unfortunately, Drew left Ole Miss and my life about as quickly as he came into it; leaving Apartment C-202 vacant. Winter came and passed, as did the second semester of my freshman year. By the beginning of the Fall semester in 2016 I had almost entirely forgotten about that apartment and the role it had played in my life. New characters entered onto the stage of my life; each taking up a role in my fast-paced adventures. I soon befriended a gay couple, Liam and Corey, who I sought out solely for their role as enablers of my drug use. My occasional smoke seshes freshman year turned into smoking five-plus times a day, skipping classes and spending hours high as a kite without an end in sight! It was these glorious times that were spent in Apartment C-202. Corey had managed to finagle his way into moving from a shitty dorm room into a slightly less shitty apartment. That kind of upward momentum is pretty big for a poor college student; I made good use of my friendship with them by coming over nigh every day and smoking out the apartment. We spent hours talking about random shit; Liam and Corey were avowed socialists and used any opportunity to push their views on us. I also met my current partner Grace during that semester as well as her best friend Chris. We all became so close that it was pretty much expected that each of us would meet at the apartment at some point during the day; we all came over uninvited anyways. However, very soon my life would change because of events that transpired in that apartment. Apartment C-202 was my hub to the strange and fantastical world of psychedelia.

On a breezy Thursday in late October, as I was on my way to Arabic class my partner’s best friend Chris approached me in the lobby of our dorm. Chris pulled me aside quickly and said:

“Dude, I’m like, tripping really hard right now.”

“No fucking way dude! On what?”

“1-P LSD. It’s like LSD except made in a lab for research. I’ve never tripped before and I kinda bought this impulsively.”

“Shit man, I kinda wanna explore this with you.”

“You wanna go out into the woods and chill?”

“Wait, what? That was random as fuck! But yeah sure man, I’ll even smoke you out.”

“That sounds excellent.”

So a smoke sesh and deep conversation in the woods turned into one of the most emotionally, physically, mentally, and visually enthralling experience of my life. To pay me back for the weed, Chris gave me a tab of LSD and thrust me into the world of psychedelia. Little did I know that, not only had Chris purchased LSD, he had also bought a substance known as 4-AcO-DMT which imitates a psilocybin mushroom and turns into the psychoactive compound psilocin in the body, initiating a psychedelic trip. Later that evening, Chris, my partner, our other two best friends (amicably referred to as the Gays), and I all gathered in apartment C-202 of Northgate Apartments, now occupied by the Gays. It was so bizarre to me that somehow, my new best friends occupied the same apartment that I spent days and days in my freshman year before the departure of Drew. And, sitting in the middle of the living room, was the Table.

On that night, we realized the table was the center of our universe. On that Table, the doses of DMT were split up and taken. We returned that night, time and time again circled around the Table, for many activities. We suffered a problem on a number of occasions where we struggled to pack a bowl of weed to smoke and just left it lying around on the table, until there were tidily constructed piles on each corner of the table. It was also on that night and the next morning that my partner and I decided to start dating and is now our anniversary.