P.T.R.

In my writing class, we were assigned to read a handful of stories, and then write a response to one of them. The response was supposed to have the same theme (my choice being the "life-changing event"). I wanted to write about a particual interesting incedent in my life, but it wasn't actually life-changing, just, well, interesting, so I added an ending to it that made it work. The mess of words below are the essay, but with the false ending chopped off. Other than that, it's unaltered, and I still like it well enough. Comments are always appreciated.

Oh, and the title has nothing to do with the essay, or anything really.
Incidentally, it's probably my favourite part.

I Closed My Eyes, Like Marvin Gaye

It was cold out. It was the end of December then, and the dead of winter. It must have been in the 30’s that day, but there I was in the middle of the woods wearing a t-shirt, an AC/DC sweatshirt and a pair of jeans, that despite my mothers’ hemming them, were shredded around the back of the feet from my walking on them. I was out in the woods with a pair of friends, David & Justin. They weren’t my closest friends, but were more the kind of people you would hang out with if your real friends were busy, or you just had nothing better to do.

Where we were was a small clearing made by generations of delinquent teenagers. “The Spot” as we called it, was littered with beer cans and the likes, and furnished with cigarette burned lawn chairs as well as a table held up by a stump, as one of its legs had been snapped off in a drunken frenzy.

David was sifting through the mess on the ground, searching for an uncrushed can to fashion into a pipe, but I told him not to bother. I brandished a corn-cob pipe which I had come across while rooting through my closet. My mother had given it to me as a Christmas gift when I was in the first grade as a reference to Frosty the Snowman. I passed it to David, who then fished a bag of pot out of his pants pocket, which was followed by a smaller bag containing four or five small white pills. I asked him what they were, and he replied “Methadone. Synthetic heroin. It’s what they give heroin addicts at rehab clinics.” He stuffed some weed into the pipe, packing it tightly. He then crushed one of the pills and sprinkled small white grains on top of the pot.

He offered me the pipe, but I turned it down. I was nervous of the pills, afraid of what they could do. What neither them were aware of was that I had made a promise to myself that I would never touch any sort of medications, as I believed they were dangerous. What I had forgotten was that I had made that same promise to myself before about marijuana, and alcohol before that.
They passed the pipe back and forth until they had depleted its contents and quickly re-packed the bowl just as before, with another powdered pill, just as before. I hadn’t been paying them any mind while they were refilling the pipe, so when they offered it to me the second time I didn’t refuse it. I noticed the bottom of the pipe had been blackened, as it had never actually been intended for use. Flicking the lighter, I held its flame over the concoction and sucked as much air as I could to ignite the contents of the bowl. I held in the acrid smoke as long as I could, and coughed it out when I couldn’t hold it any longer. The smoke that had filled my lungs carried the foul taste that was usual of pot, but there was a bitter sharpness that was out of the ordinary. I knew what it was in the back of my mind, but I couldn’t bring it forth.

It wasn’t until we’d repeated this process enough times to deplete our drug supply that it dawned on me; the bitterness the smoke had carried was the methadone. I had smoked more than an entire dose of it and I was already beginning to feel its effects setting in. I was afraid of what was to come, but the fear was wearing thin. The cold I had been previously was now gone, overtaken by a kind of warmth and comfort I had never felt before. I was like I was sheltered in an unseen blanket, immensely thick but not constricting, made out of some sort of fiber that reassured me everything would be alright, and nothing else in the world mattered. It told me I was safe.

So we started running. Not down the path that leads to The Spot, but into the woods around us. We dove headlong through the brush, tearing through the vines and brambles long dead from the cold winter. As we ran, we laughed and called out to one another, not feeling the bitter cold as we flew. We soon found ourselves on a road, the main road in our neighborhood, but we didn’t stop there, in fact, we only ran faster. We sprinted down the road, still laughing and shouting, shoving each other to gain headway and letting each other pass just to do it again, all out of breath but completely unaware.

We must have run five miles by the time we’d stopped. We were at the middle school in our neighborhood, our preconceived destination, although I was oblivious to it. We stood outside of the school, not talking, only laughing and waiting for a person we knew was coming, although I was oblivious to that as well.

A blue Volkswagen Beetle rolled up to us, and I remembered who it was; Emalee (pronounced Emily (I always thought the way her name was spelled was asinine)). I opened the passenger door of the car and we fell in. We were immediately overtaken by a wave of heat, which had the same sort of effect as the methadone, but this time it was real.