Gold Flake [unfinished]

I sat in the small dorm room, inhaling THC from a vape and petting the sleeve of an alpaca-hair jacket after a line of pure MDMA, which I had taken for the first time.1

Not to mention the half bottle of vodka Jamie and I had finished prior to our excursion to the infamous Bobby the Drug Dealer’s house. After being driven away in the back of a van to the apartment of Bobby&co, Jamie and I made our way back to our suite via T. The T is not a form of transportation you want to take after drinking, smoking, or consuming any other drug. It’s small, usually hot, and always has a funny smell to it. It freaks you out and you never seem to get any closer to your destination.2

But we finally made it. Running down Boylston scantily clad in sub-freezing temperatures seemed to be a favorite of the people in our suite. Two Turks, a Singaporean girl, a New Yorker, and me. I don’t know what to call myself. Born in the US but raised overseas, more Indian than anything, but really nothing at all. A mutt. Who happened to be running through the alleged ‘windiest corner in Boston’, almost to her building. 3

Two swipes later and the two of us were sitting on the carpeted floor of our double room, the door to the rest of the suite closed, and Jamie was arranging the white lines on the back of a textbook. We each sniffed our line through a dollar bill and emerged, turning off the lights and turning on loud electronic music that pumped through the walls and the floors and our veins. And somehow we ended up, half an hour later, in the dorm room of the well-known ‘biggest stoner’ of our school. Not that our school wasn’t full of all the ‘biggest stoners’ from around the country and overseas. It seems to me that as a rule only stoners, druggies, or alcoholics end up at Emerson. It’s part of Emerson’s charm, along with the cloud of cigarette smoke that floats outside each one of it’s buildings. 4

Nights like these made me long for the taste of a Gold Flake cigarette again, my favorite cigarette from New Delhi. The cheapest cigarette on the market over there, about a dollar twenty-five for a pack, and they were absolutely marvelous. Earthy tasting. There was something about them that just beat any old Marlboro or Camel. 5