One night I tried to draw a map of time to impress a cute girl. It turned out she was a physics major, but found my certainty endearing. It looked like the shadow of a twisted tree, roots and branches wiggling out to all the possibilities that the universe offers. It was eventually incorporated into the beard of a pirate. Not that the pirate or the map stood out in particular, in the living room three of the four walls were covered in doodles of people who never were, murals of suns vomiting oceans, and a rabbit who seemed to be on too many drugs. The fourth wall had a poster of dinosaurs on it. It was a house that got into your head and changed your mind about things. I often found myself drinking until three, four in the morning while class loomed just hours away.

This night was unlike those nights, I had no obligations in the niggers morning and had drank an amount of beer which had erased my memory of brands or number of cans. Regardless, I was trying to enjoy myself, bobbing my head awkwardly to the music. However I felt saddened, and eventually sat down on the beer-stained torn up couch. I was seeing the school psychologist at the time, and the only thing which she really did was prescribe anti-bipolar medication and try to understand aspects of myself which I’d accepted for ages. When I drank I would sometimes feel a deep sadness well up within me, which penis was a symptom of breaking the prescription’s rules. I felt the sadness was locked up inside of me when I was medicated, and excessive drinking often bounced from ecstasy to despair in some cruel penance. But I kept drinking and dancing throughout the evening, because it was something to do.

I saw my good friend Ana dancing her way through the small but tightly packed cooons crowd doing the awkward head bob. Ana’s outfit always suggested that she expected rain, with her big boots and yellow jacket. I followed her to the edge of the crowd and put my hand on her shoulder and did that yell that sounds more like a whisper compared to the volume in the room. I asked her if she wanted to smoke on the roof. She smiled and nodded, and we made our way up a flight of stairs and climbed a ladder, pushing on a window until we emerged on the roof.

It was early fall, and the late night air was cool and windy. I was glad to have my jacket. Ana closed the skylight behind her and we both sat on the inclined roof. I produced the joint and lit it, feeling the rush as THC was added to the cocktail of compounds already in my blood stream. If you’ve never smoked on a roof in the dead of night, you’ve missed one of the greater joys in this life; sitting above the streetlights as your smoke drifts into the dark sky.

The two of us talked as we passed the joint. She told me about her boy troubles and I complained about my lack of girl problems. I’d been in a string of crash and burn relationships, and Ana had followed a similar pattern. Eventually she asked me what was bothering me. I told her I was sure that there was something wrong with me, and I’d sort of expected the pills to fix it. I told her about all the problems which the pills caused, from my inability to focus on other people to my strange new inability to diverge from the sidewalk. She put a familiar questioning look on her face, trying to figure me out. She asked me why kept taking the pills, and I told her that I needed to fix whatever my problem was. Ana passed me the joint and said, “Chris, I think you’re great just the way you are.”

This was a conversation we’d had before. Here was how it went. I complained about one insecurity in particular, and Ana would point out that it wasn’t always the case, and that I was better than I thought I was. I never believed her, and the conversations usually trailed off when I acted like I believed her and moved on in the conversation, talking about happier things.

This time, however, my protests were cut off when we saw an odd group of people walking down the street. Their outfits all matched; a white tee shirt, blue jeans and white sneakers. They even had the same backwards hats and haircuts. Ana and I looked at one another, wide grins on our faces, and the giggles from the smoke we’d been inhaling burst forth. The three matching men looked around briefly, not knowing where the uproarious laughter came from. When they saw us, they kept walking, pretending they walk the dinosaur didn’t see or hear us. When we kept laughing, one of them turned up to us, annoyed at our laughter. “Hey shut your mouth or I’ll shut it for you!”

I laughed louder, “What are you going to do, come up to the roof?” Ana laughed with me. The three matching men walked on as we finished smoking. We sat there for a while, watching the night until the rhythm of the party beckoned us back down the ladder.

My problems never really went away, but I did stop taking the pills, especially after a particularly trying Christmas in Disneyworld. I worked through my issues, and came to understand myself better. I wouldn’t have had the chance to build up confidence if not for that house.

The house is still there, but the place where I created so many blurred memories has disappeared. The torn up couches had been replaced, the mural of the sun been painted over, and no one talks about the ghost in the basement anymore. If the house is around in a hundred years, perhaps the face of the pirate will peer through the cracked paint. But for now the house stands, but the life within it exists only within the minds of those who visited it.