Staff writer - Maria Costa
Someone once said that sometimes you have to get to know someone really well to realise that you’re really strangers.
Having spent a year with Mr.Caribbean and known him for three, I thought I pretty much knew all that I needed to. That was until I arrived at his home, turned my key in the lock and attempted to open the door but struggled to do so. It wasn’t until I was welcomed by a suspicious piquant aroma that I knew why I couldn’t open the door; he’d put a towel under the aperture to disguise the smell.
Mr.Caribbean was smoking marijuana.
Before I entered the living room, I tried to control my breathing. He was well aware that I abhorred the idea of smoking drugs.
I would always urge his friends who smoked to instead seek pleasure or solace in our surrounding world.
With an indefinite amount of beauty in our vistas, words, people and nature, how can anyone want to deliberately cloud their mind?
I eased open the living room door to find him sitting there with his friend.
”What’s going on?!” I asked, trying my hardest to remain poised and relatively calm.
I silently marvelled at how strange the feeling was when you expect a person to be apologetic and seek your forgiveness and then they suddenly retort with a nonchalant stance instead.
“What? A man can’t relax in his own yard?”
His friend scoffing at this, made me want to take that marijuana cigarette from behind his ear and stick it someplace.
My facial expressions had always lent themselves well as distinct warnings and the friend soon left, leaving the two of us in an open room which was slowly closing in on us.
I sighed as the diffusing smoke ominously signalled the onset of an argument with the pungent scent forcing its way in to my lungs and pervading through me until finally it entered my mind, satisfied with its veil over my thoughts.
”What are you thinking D?!”
"Is smoking weed the answer?"
“Relax yourself! Always trying to tell me what to do! I enjoy it, it relaxes me, I won’t stop. Not for you or anyone!”
My heart sank and my energy levels appeared to instantly deplete at the prospect of a full blown fight. My face was becoming hot and I could feel salty tears preparing themselves to claim their locus on my cheek.
I left before I became the girl who cried because her man was smoking drugs.
And so I did what I see lots of thinking people do; I found a lonely bench and graced it with my forlorn presence.
In my love for him, I tried to reason that perhaps it was a culture thing. His father had smoked and his father before him. It wasn’t a constant thing; he enjoyed it now and again and it helped him to sleep. Afterall, it even had a reputation for aiding in the case of chronic pain for some unfortunate people suffering from disease.
Could certain drugs ever be viewed as a positive thing?
With that last thought, I realised that I was compromising myself for a man. A man who couldn’t stop something that was in his benefit to do so.
I couldn’t lie to myself; I knew not how to do so. Without exception, I wholly loathed drugs and he knew this.
And then he kissed me.
As I withdrew from him, my eyes still closed, I took his hands.
If you want to relax, lucidate your mind don’t cloud it.
If you want to laugh, embody good company don’t ignore them.
If you want to be creative, embrace your intellect, do not eradicate it.
If you want me, be yourself and not an inferior version of you.
Drugs couldn’t ever be condoned. That’s just me.
And then I kissed him back…and he put that in his pipe and smoked it instead.
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