Southern Legitimacy Statement: I was technically born south of New Jersey, but I don’t remember a lick of being a newborn baby so all I have are the recollections of being south of Virginia. I’m nearly as south as it can get in Virginia, with most of my childhood having been in Virginia Beach, so maybe I’m a little eastern too. Nowadays, I’m in Newport News, where nothing’s ever really new, always going south. Sometimes I’m south of my mom, south of my dad, definitely south of my boyfriend, given he lives above me, but I’m mostly south of myself. There’s no better way to acknowledge it in my opinion.
The Highest a Southerner Can Get
It was only a year or two ago. I remember it fresher than this morning’s dew. My parents split around 2019, my mom packed up and left and promised to return some other day. Then 2021 strikes, crazy, never thought we’d ever leave the teens but we did. I stopped being a kid too, which scared me, but here we are. They get split custody, but I stay with my mom for all of middle school and most of high school — so far.
One day, my dad has this striking idea! We should go camping. With his girlfriend, who I hardly knew (and hardly liked), but it wasn’t a total loss, given I hardly saw her for most of the trip. It was only a day, nothing more, nothing less.
Night struck, as it does, and when I’m casually sitting at the table, minding my own business – my dad, black as the sky, or maybe a little more brown, he’s toned like a well toasted marshmallow, which fits the location. Regardless, he does the whitest thing any black man can do, given he was raised in the suburbs of south Jersey, and he hands his thirteen year old son an edible.
It’s small, about the size of a penny, and whether it was chocolate or jerky, I’ll never really know. But for my first edible, I took it about as well as a dog takes a whooping. Yet, it didn’t set in immediately. It took its time going through my body. So, of course, my father and I took the chance to explore the campsite. Unfortunately, we didn’t strand ourselves in the woods with a tent and a dream, but rather a trailer park with some trailers and a few small cabins. There was a small arcade, and those giant inflatable inverted trampolines. They were like if a small hill was a trampoline.
I laid down on it, and my dad joined me. It was surprisingly clear in the skies for New Jersey. We talked about stars, as most star-gazers do. He passed down some much already known wisdom, but it felt like more than that. It was the first real conversation I felt I had with my dad despite my disparaging opinion of him that went further downhill every year since the divorce. Maybe it was the especially bright stars that night, or how cold it was and how warm his chest was.
But, at some point in the night, we have to go back to the cabin, and I need some time alone. It was at this point that I considered my first experience with an edible, a bust. However, I have a terrible insomnia issue and I wanted to talk to my boyfriend throughout the night. That was when it struck, the terrible tragicomedy of my first high.
At first, it was between a few messages, I’d often intervene with how weird I was beginning to feel, and black spots in my memories. The feeling began to prevent me from even being able to go to sleep. It was as if I was trapped in my own body, pinching and begging to peel my skin off, endless buzzes in my mind.
Yet, the devil couldn’t reach me, so he sent my own dad to constantly, and I mean, constantly, bombard into my room like a drunken lard, giggling and snorting to himself one minute and crying another. The amount of insecurity seeping through his tongue, and the irritation that kept building up every turn of the knob, was enough to drive anyone crazy. I eventually had to ban him from my room, locking the door and curled up in the corner of the bed, because he simply would not stop.
The next morning, it felt like a fever dream had struck me like a freight train. It was unreal, the entire night. Whatever a high is supposed to feel like, it was not that. As they say, your body is a temple. I’ll certainly take better care of it – meaning keeping the devil’s assistant out of it.
