Rooftop

One night I tried to draw a map of time on the blank plaster. I was trying to impress a cute girl, but turned out she was a physics major, but found my certainty in this matter endearing. It looked like the shadow of a twisted tree, roots and branches wiggling out to all the possibilities that the universe offers; tangling and crisscrossed. 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. All of the walls had holes in them from people too drunk for the good of the house. It was a house that got into your head and changed your mind about things. For example; exactly how late one can stay up drinking before class?

This night was unlike those nights, I had no obligations in the 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. 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 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 up on the skylight 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 combined with the cocktail of compounds already in my blood stream and I began to feel myself unwind. 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 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 really see other people’s faces 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.”

I was still unused to people saying that and meaning it. Ever since I was in preschool, that sentence has always been qualified. “I like you just the way you are, but color inside the lines.”

“I like you the way you are but stop fidgeting.”

“I like you the way you are but Fix your handwriting.”

“-take this Ritalin.”

“-why aren’t you more social? You just sit around like you’re sedated.”

“-why can’t we Just have sex?”

“-I can’t date you anymore.”

“-you know you could get into a better college?”

And so this was a conversation Ana and I had before. Here was how it usually 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 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 grinned as I shouted down to the street, “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. With a lack of pills bringing me down, I didn’t need to drink or smoke as often to bring me up, and was comfortable without needing an excuse to be.

This story is one that blurs together with all the other tales from that house. If I had to pinpoint what night it happened on, I wouldn’t be able to tell you. So many awful things happened there. I drank too much of a blue liquor and was almost beat up by an off duty army guy. I smoked pot with a dwarf and was a few hours later slapped in the face by a black man. I’ve been out of my head on drugs in that house, and had crazy sex. But that moment on the roof was one of the perfect moments that crystallized in my mind.

The house is still there, but the place where I created so many blurred memories has disappeared. The torn up couches have 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.