A Silent Moment

My window’s cracked open as the rain continues to fall. I already secured my blinds away from the window, so I could watch the storm, the sky continuing to darken into hues of navy and purple, swirling in the deep dark clouds.

I had just put on some low-fi beats on my speaker through my phone, so the room was buzzing with ambient, non-lyrical music. Sitting on the edge of my bed, I took a long drag from my joint, and laid back down on the mattress, listening to the steady pitter-patter of rain mixed with the ambient music.

This is when I feel calm. This makes me feel most at peace and in tune with myself.

I exhaled slowly, watching the smoke billow out of my mouth and up into the air above my head. Being high when it’s raining is really an existential experience—you can feel everything. This is my therapy, my recovery, my savior from rock bottom, and an amazing time to meditate.

Whenever I listen to music and I’m smoking weed, it’s like the beats of the music actually fall in tune with some crazy other-worldly melody. I often find myself questioning what music really is at moments like this—as humans, how can we fall in love with something so beautiful, rhythmic, and so universally-accepted. My head starts to roll from side to side slowly in time with the baseline, as if my body was accepting the melody.

Finishing the joint, I sat up to put it out, and grab my giant knitted blanket, pulling my feet up to my chest against my headboard, reaching for my cup of tea.

I grabbed my journal, it was bound in worn-out black leather with pages sticking out from random insets of writing, thoughts, and pictures. I start writing down random thoughts—I never understood how people can be so anal about how they write in their journals—if my thoughts don’t happen in a linear progression, why should each journal entry be written like a story? I began writing about the universe, causality, how people are entering and exiting my life at different times for different reasons, and what love really feels like.

They call me “Universe Girl” for a reason. I tend to live spiritually, encompassing every decision as a part of a ready-made master plan that has a purpose no matter how you look at it. People will argue me about how life is actually meaningless, just a by-product of random interactions of different organisms and human beings just happened to come along because of it.

If this is a random moment, why does every action I take feel so RIGHT? Like the universe wanted me to sit here in this moment and journal some ideas, maybe forcing me to self-reflect, and pay attention to the world around me in greater detail.

I stared out the window for a brief second—if this is all due to chance, I was sure I wouldn’t be here now. There wouldn’t be a point to any of my suffering, my fighting, my feeble attempts at survival. If I went through all that to be here now, then I must have done something right—and that’s how I tend to view the world. Not so nihilistic as some people may think.

My high ramblings often lead me to have revolutionary outcomes, full of meaning, and ideas, and future plans. Today just lead me to be at peace, and to be able to sit here quietly for a second to contemplate how beautiful the world can be when everything seems to be in tune with one another.

The music. The rain. The sound of my pen on paper. The feeling of my blanket hugging my body. My feet wrapped up in warm socks. How warm my mug of tea feels pressed in between both my hands. The feel of air entering and exiting my lungs. How my own skin feels under my touch.

We don’t take enough time to be thankful for the little things. For the ability to sit up and reflect, to have a cup of tea, to have a quiet moment by yourself uninterrupted.

I think we would all do well to take a few moments a week like this. Noticing things we normally wouldn’t, like the feel of a cotton blanket, the sensory feeling of rain, the warmth of a mug.

We jump to thinking of a bigger picture. I like dialing it down and thinking of smaller aspects that we often take for granted.

I smile softly, in awe of the benefit of a silent moment.