High As Shit

There’s this thing where you just need to get higher than everything around you. Not literally necessarily, though that works. Higher than the people before you, the people after you, the people next to you. Just elevated. Untethered. The method doesn’t matter—you figure out your own path. Some people chase it through smoke, watching it curl through their lungs. Some go for substances that taste like death but somehow rewire how you think about things. I’ve known people warned off by someone who’d been there and come back burned, but they went anyway because the promise of a new thought was worth it.

But the easiest way, if you’re not trying too hard, is music. The kind that doesn’t ask permission, just takes you somewhere. Paul Banks does that thing where the song builds and builds and your chest gets tight. There’s this moment where you realize you’re not in the room anymore. Ellie Goulding’s voice hits a register that feels like light, like something physical and almost painful. And Lana Del Rey—there’s something about how she holds a note, the way she makes melancholy sound like the only true thing in the world. You’re not thinking about what’s around you when those songs are playing. You’re somewhere else.

That’s the high. That’s the whole point. You get there and everything that was pressing down stops for a while. The noise becomes music becomes feeling becomes nothing but the present moment, and the present moment is finally enough.