My First Edibles High

By Brittney M. Walker

I started smoking weed recently. Now that I basically like it, I want to check out different iterations of the good ol’ herb, including edibles.

One day I meet a chef. We become friends. We joke about hosting a cannabis infusion dinner party a few times. Well, really the dinners would be him hosting and cooking while the rest of the imaginary ‘us’ would be eating and drinking.

Anyway, he starts to experiment with cannabis infusions but I hadn’t had the chance to check out any of his creations.

We decide to meet after months of him teasing me with photos of his food. We decide I would try out a few of his experiments during a road trip. When I arrive to his home, the meeting spot, he makes me a ‘special’ espresso. It was delicious. The coffee was given an upgrade with cinnamon, a bit of cayenne pepper and cannabis infused coconut oil. It was probably the best cup of espresso I’ve had since Italy.

Before partaking, I fervently mention that I never had an edible of any kind and don’t want to be high all day.

I drink the whole cup of coffee and eat a date with cannabis infused goat cheese. He warns that I’d probably be fucked up. I laugh, unbelieving.

We get on the road. I drive first because he needs a moment to get work done. Besides, since the cannabis needs time to hit my system, we think driving first is an amazing idea.

I drive for about an hour, talking with his auntie/cousin/sister/friend, who is in the front seat. She’s a lovely woman with great insight and she carries on a great conversation. She is also slightly high strung.

I’m driving along when in between laughter and a “ooh chil’e’” the cannabis hits my system. I can’t hear what auntie/cousin/sister/friend is saying, but I know that if she knew that the cannabis was starting to take hold of me, she’d flip the fuck out and the ride would turn into a whoopin’. So I calmly say, “Oh, I have to use the bathroom.”

Secretly, however, I’m starting to become paranoid about whether or not the car in front of me is going to stop suddenly or if I am going to go blind before I pull over or if she can tell I was high. There’s a hot mess of thoughts rushing through my brain. I grip the steering wheel with all my strength and widen my eyes as if it will stop me from being high.

Fortunately, we don’t die before I park the car at a travelers’ plaza in the middle of the highway.

As soon as I shift the car into park, I bolt to the bathroom, afraid I’m going to pee on myself. Come to think of it, I don’t think I even needed to go. On the way out of the bathroom, I catch a glimpse of my eyes. “Yup, I’m fucked up,” I’m thinking to myself. My eyes are red like Smokey’s on 125th and Lenox. You know, that corner crackhead that’s always nodding off after leaving the methadone clinic.

I get into the car before auntie/cousin/sister/friend does and plop on the back seat and whisper to my friend in a ‘you got caught’ voice, “Does she know I’m high?”

He busts out laughing and assures me that she has no idea. He doesn’t even know I was high until that moment. Apparently I was playing it off so smooth, no one knows. I’m just paranoid. I am so paranoid that the rest of the ride I pretend I’m asleep in the backseat so I don’t accidently say anything to auntie/cousin/sister/friend that would reveal the truth. Inside, I’m a hot damned mess.

“What if we crash?”

“I didn’t crash the car right?”

“Wait, is this purgatory?”

“If we crash, it’s not my fault, right?”

“But wait, what if it is my fault?”

“Girl, you’re high.”

“But does she know I’m high?”

My friend and auntie/cousin/sister/friend are chatting in the front. My paranoia reaches a new height. I think they are arguing, about me driving high.

“Did she find out I’m high and they’re arguing?”

“Fuck, I ruined everything.”

“She’s disgusted with me.”

“Wait, everything is good.”

“But she’s driving scared.”

“If we crash…”

It doesn’t stop for like an hour. My high just keeps getting stronger and I start to obsess over whether or not I am going to be high forever and be trapped in a perpetual highness! It’s terrifying.

Fast forward, mostly because I don’t actually remember everything that happened that day, to a moment that later I found challenging.

At this point, I am uncontrollably high and slightly frustrated with not being able to come down all day. I am so high that I need guidance with my life. I’m not sure where I am or where I’m going. I don’t think I had eaten yet. So my friend and I go to a restaurant. I am feeling flirty and silly. I am laughing a lot. I don’t know what the conversation is about or everything that has happened so far. We are seated at the front of the restaurant. Some people are seated next to us outside on the other side of the window. They’re probably watching us because I’m paranoid and think everyone is staring at us. I am super laughy and pretty sure we kiss a few times. We have mimosas.

We go to the car after leaving the restaurant. I do remember we don’t go anywhere for a while. Instead, I climb in the back seat and snatch my panties off. I remember that distinctly. He joined me in the back shortly thereafter.

I don’t remember much else except some mixture of told events and flashes of moments. He says I ask if he wants to take photos of my pussy. He does, apparently. I bend over from the back seat to the front, with my ass in the air. I ask him if he wants it. I ask for ‘the dick,’ he recalls to me the next day. He says we don’t have sex, but I briefly give him head.

Somehow, despite my insobriety, after all the escapades in the back seat, I am able to give him the address to my destination. We arrive to my relatives’ house and sit with them for a while until I fall asleep on the couch. He leaves.

The following morning, very early before the sun comes up, I wake up suddenly. I am aware, but still very high. I need to pee. You know that feeling when you have a hang over? I have that, but multiplied by 10. As soon as I attempt to get up, I become dizzy, nauseous and can barely stand.

In my insobriety, I attempt to get through the locked doggy door that stood between the porcelain and me, but I can’t figure out how to open it. So I begrudgingly march upstairs to the next bathroom and I am super relieved I make it. As I sit there, cursing the day and saying I’ll never ingest an edible again, I feel the urge to throw up.

As I sit on the toilet, afraid to get up I hang my face over the sink. Nothing comes out. I sit in the bathroom an eternity trying to figure out how I am going to get up and out.

“You have to get up. They (the people in the house) can’t get up to find you this way,” is what I say to myself.

So I try it. I get up and manage to put my pants on. In an attempt to wash my hands, I turn on the water and splash in it as I brace the counter. I turn around to leave and then I wake up on the floor of the bathroom. The sun is starting to come up. Then I wake up a second time. Yeah, I fall twice. This time I hear someone say, “Are you okay?”

I rush up and found enough adrenaline to get myself off the floor and out of the bathroom, down the stairs and back on my couch palate.

At some point, late in the day, I begin to sober up, but I feel terribly and hardly remember anything. It’s at dusk, when my friend and I are strolling along the Baltimore harbor, laughing about the previous day that I feel violated. At the time, I don’t call it that of course because it’s just a feeling I haven’t yet identified.

But as he shows me pictures of my pussy on his phone, photos of my ass in the air and me with my legs wide open at the restaurant, a knot forms in my stomach and my insides want to shrivel up to the darkest places within me and hide.

I don’t obviously react outwardly with the way I feel inside until the next day, when I am reflecting at home, where I feel safe. As I reflect, I take ownership of the experience and decide that I knew what I was getting myself into and invited the experience. But I also settle on that I did not feel safe enough to do that again with my friend. Friend?

The next day he asks via text if I had any road trip reflections. An invitation.

I tell him that I didn’t like being high that long and that strong. I didn’t like having full control of myself. He replies:

“Good thing you’re respected and were cared for so much.”

Cared for? Respected? Hmm.

I reply:

“U did take pictures of my twat and got ur dick sucked a lil.”

He calls. I don’t answer right away because I am feeling salty and need to get myself together. I don’t want to be the bitter woman blaming anyone for anything.

But we talk at some point. He says to me somewhere in our conversation that I did ask for the dick and he thought that was inappropriate because I wasn’t sober. But I was stunned that he thought taking photos of me and getting head from a temporarily insane woman in the back seat was indeed all right.

I let him know, nicely.

I suppose we’re still friendly … associates(?), but my feelings of being violated still cause me pause.

Previously published in ‘Unapologetically,’ a collection of personal narratives.