Psst. Hey, you. Yeah, you. C’mere. I have a secret to tell.

When Craig and I first met, I admitted to him that I’ve never tried marajuana before. He was floored. “Not even second hand smoke?” he asked. No not really, I said. It’s not that I’ve never had the opportunity, it’s just that I was never curious enough to want to try it.

Suddenly he had a mission in life: he was was going to get me stoned.

Almost 2 years later, after ticking off everything on our relationship checklist of things to accomplish (e.g. move in together, buy a car together, get engaged, get married), he texted me with, “I have something very special on the way for you. Something I promised you a long time ago.”

“Really?” I replied. “I usually remember those things but now I can’t remember what it was.”

“I will be getting some very special candy…”

Candy?! I instantly started thinking about all the different exotic candies I’ve been dying to try:  Violetas from Spain, Meiji chocolate from Japan, Turkish delight from, well, Turkey… and yes, I have memorized an unusually long list of exotic candy I’ve been wanting to try.

“…it has a very special leaf in it…”

“Leaf?! It better not be a salad!”

Turns out they were cannabis gummies. An acquaintance of his offered them when he told her I’d never gotten high before. Craig was so proud of his score, he had the entire evening planned out. He said I would ingest them before leaving for dinner Friday night since they’ll take a while to kick in. Then after dinner, we’ll do a Ben & Jerry’s run, then spend the rest of the evening being couch vegetables and listening to Bob Marley. It was the quintessential stoner experience. The only things missing were the black lights, velvet posters, and lava lamps.

So fast forward to our Friday evening, we were halfway through dinner and it had been 45 minutes since I ate the candy. So far all I felt was really sleepy. “Wouldn’t it be funny if the only effect it had on me was drowsiness?” I’d said.

“With you? That’s possible,” Craig said.

Not long after that I began to feel a little strange. I looked around at the dining room and all the fellow diners around us at their tables. It’s almost as if things began to move in slow motion, like we were under water.

“Are you starting to feel really mellow?” Craig asked.

I nodded slowly, continuing to look around. “Yeah… things are starting to look a little different. Like everything’s under water.”

He giggled like a schoolgirl.

Once we paid for dinner, we decided to head over to Kroger on Spring Valley. Now this is where it got a little scary. My trip slightly intensified while I was driving, so it probably wasn’t a good idea for me to be behind the wheel at the time. But it’s like as I was driving, it’s almost as if the fabric of time was gradually beginning to stretch out. Every second that passed seemed like ages ago. My inner voice became much more prominent, reminding myself of where I was, who I was, and what I was doing.

“Yeah, you’re going to have to drive home from here I think,” I told Craig.

As we walked through the grocery store, Craig said I looked mesmerized. “You look like a little girl,” he said, laughing. In a way he was right, I felt like I had put on a different pair of glasses and I was seeing things for the first time.

Standing in the ice cream aisle, I perused the assortment of Ben & Jerry’s. “I think I want this one,” I said, utterly pleased at my decision.

“‘Chunky Monkey,’” Craig recited off the label. He smiled at me. “My little stoner chick wants ‘Chunky Monkey.’ Ok, then. ‘Chunky Monkey’ it is.”

Since Craig drove the rest of the evening, that allowed me to fully immerse myself in the experience. Every sensation was magnified. I could feel every inch of my skin, from the top of my scalp to the tips of my toes. At any point I could zoom in on a part of my body and enhance what it was experiencing as if it was a separate part of me. Like my feet, for example, and how my flats just loosely hugged them and wrapped around them. Or how the car seat cupped the back of my thighs. I was suddenly hyper-aware of how my body was interacting with the space around me.

When we arrived home, Craig told me to get comfortable and relax and that he would prepare the ice cream. So I did. I changed into some comfortable lounge clothes and collapsed on the couch. I found myself staring most of the time. Staring and thinking. I know most of my experience was happening in my head because like I said, my inner voice had become more vocal.

As we were sitting there eating our ice cream, Craig would ask me questions about what I was experiencing. “It’s weird,” I said. “I don’t want to move because I feel like if I do, then I’ll forget the previous moment.” Every second, it was like I was waking up from a dream and I was trying to remember if the previous five minutes had been real or not. The entire day felt like it was far into the past. Time was already completely stretched out as far as it would go. And every once in a while, I would look at the clock and realize only 2 minutes had passed when it felt like it had been an eternity.

“I remember one time when I was high, everything I did felt like I was doing it for the first time,” Craig said. “Like I would be in the middle of something, like eating with a fork, and I would think, ‘Wow, I’m eating with a fork… And I’m doing this well.'”

I laughed, that’s exactly what it felt like. They were like mini bouts of amnesia. I would be sitting there, then I would realize, “Oh wait, where am I? Oh yeah I live here.” Then I’d see Craig sitting in the chair. “Whoa, who’s that?” I thought. “Oh, yeah, that’s Craig. We got married recently. He’s my husband.” And then Izzie would jump on the couch next to me. “Yikes, what’s that?! Oh that’s a dog. Yeah, that’s Izzie. I have a dog named Izzie.” I was reliving my life moment-to-moment. Some people might think that was scary, but in hindsight, I think that’s beautiful. In a way, it forced me to slow down and just experience my environment for once rather than blindly exist in it.

Craig, who was sober the entire evening, loved observing me. “We have to do this again,” he said. “Maybe not every weekend, but every couple months or so.”

Yeah, I thought. Just like wine connoisseurs love to indulge in an expensive bottle of wine at the end of a busy week, this might be our “occasional expensive bottle of wine.”