The first time I smoked weed was the summer between 10th and 11th grade when I worked construction. I say I worked construction, but us high schoolers only hauled wheelbarrows full of wet concrete from one side of the site to the other for a few hours while LIUNA guys fit beams and bricks together around us.

Anyway, this one day at lunch, a couple of the older kids pulled out a joint. It slowly made its way around to me. It’s important for you to understand that I have never had a magical, affirming, or romantic experience with drugs that everyone always talks about; it’s always been ugly or uncomfortable for me. This joint burned the hell out of my throat, and the older kids laughed as I coughed hunks of lung out. As the weed pinched and swirled my brain into a spiral of bad feelings, I had an instant anxiety attack that my parents somehow saw me inhale and they’d kill me when they got home from work that night.

I looked up the chute of steel beams and scaffolding extending above me and felt like my life was another ledge to fall from.

I went home and loaded this game in my PS2. The King of All Cosmos told me what happened to all the stars: “We felt the beauty of all things, and felt love for all. That’s how it was. Did you see? We smiled a genuine smile. Did you see? The stars splintering in perfect beauty. So many there used to be, almost a nuisance. Now there’s nothing but darkness.”

After a few levels, my anxiety waned, and I was left floating in a sad, languid pool. I looked around my room and saw that this, too, was a stellar nursery, and all this shit surrounding me, the furniture and appliances and assorted ephemera I’d accumulated, would be compacted into bigger and bigger balls that might one day find their way to the fluted edges of this low-end galaxy.

I guess I was just another stoned kid blinking into the light of a half-formed realization that our small life ends, and the King of All Cosmos is aloof at best, and we are always collecting or building things under some hazy directive, even when we don’t know why or whether doing it does anything. Still, there is superfluous beauty and love for all. Did you see?