The Stoned Angel

In what was clearly the last legs of winter, the street outside the University of Winnipeg was buzzing as the flurries of frost were slowly petering out. The days finally started to become longer with the sun not setting until way past 6:00pm. It was amazing to see the alacrity at which fresh snow was shoveled away while it was still soft, neatly to the sides of the pavements by the city. The warmth inside the stately Gothic buildings that belonged to the collegiate provided momentary relief from the bitter cold during my lectures, but I wanted to go outside and look for action at a bar or a club and get drunk or something. Spring meant that summer was nearly here, so downtown Winnipeg was filled with people looking for the same sort of thing, unwilling to admit that the darkness looked like it was still time for hibernation. The weekend was about to start and crowds of people were everywhere outside. The locals here are friendly, obsequiously going out of their way not to offend an exotic looking stranger such as myself. Most of them were much more fair-skinned having become accustomed to the extreme harshness of the Canadian arctic, making their features flush bright red. Mine stayed as dark as I felt, dark as the night sky was becoming as the stars became visible.

It was my first year as a freshman, “fresh off the boat” as they say, dreading returning to my one-bedroom closet-sized apartment in the city. I had moved to Canada pretty recently for a poetry fellowship studying on a scholarship in my third semester. Trying my best to keep my grades up while having a social life through the winter proved not to be as difficult as I expected. The city of Winnipeg in Manitoba is connected by indoor walkways and underground tunnels making traversing feel like everytime you were going out it was a mission out of an episode of Star Trek.

After my classes had ended for the week, of which I attended my lectures sitting in front like a sycophant, all of a sudden, some unfamiliar passive-aggressive voices screamed at me, “there goes jerk off Zayd, the king of jacking off!” I may have been blushing, I’m can't be entirely sure. Since arriving at the University of Winnipeg, I spoke openly about wanking as if it was perfectly acceptable dinner table conversation. Having no social awareness never bothered me. I was just relieved to be making friends, trying my best to assimilate. I saw that my distasteful favourite subjects of conversation had earned me a group of friends who enjoyed humiliating me in the hallways. I joined the company of the hooligans who had addressed me in such condescending familiarity. The king of jacking off? I had no problem with that, I decided to wear my crown with pride. I felt like I was finally fitting in.

As we stepped outside, It seemed like the locals were not willing to accept that the weather was still exponentially more extreme than the harshest East Indian winters I had ever seen. Some were dressed as if it was as if it was t-shirt and shorts weather, acting as they would as if it was summer, slipping and sliding along the pavements on bikes when I thought skiing or being on ice skates would be more appropriate transportation.

The main attraction for me to study in such a utopian land as Canada was the promising prospect of smoking legal cannabis openly. Anywhere where people were previously allowed to smoke cigarettes, was now okay to smoke weed. To my delight, the area right behind my new alma mater smelt distinctly dank with the familiar sweet-smelling aroma of marijuana being freely passed around between males and their female counterparts. Looking like a dour devil, I made my way towards a stoned angel who I was already fimilar with, drunk on love, like ill-fated star crossed lovers. Her name was Sheila. She had a boyfriend, but that didn’t deter me. I wasn’t looking for anything serious, just eternal friendship. And sex, of course. We set about determining a course of action for the evening. I made it clear that my intention was to get comatose on Canadian Club. No one had any problems there. We made plans to get wasted at a bar downtown. The first club we went to was called the Pyramid Cabaret where we drank all night and danced to live music. 

Closer to dawn than midnight, everyone decided that it was finally time to leave. Slowly, everyone began dispersing. I cajoled Sheila to walk me, being unfamiliar with the city and, frankly, I was scared not knowing what kind of psychos I could run into. I had been warned that the level of intercity crime was dangerously high. With red eyes, as close as I was to actually being comatose, as we walked towards my place, I did what I would never have done had I not been drinking. Sheila and I were friends, we had a completely platonic understanding that I would never betray, had I been sober. Being drunk was a completely different beast altogether. I knew she had a boyfriend, and even a daughter out of wedlock. This intrigued me but didn’t deter me in my drunken daze. I made my move. Instead of being kissed back, Sheila repeatedly punched me with the kind of frightful force that I would have never imagined possible with the kind of women I knew back home. Backing up, I tripped her out with the melting spring and lay my falling angel into the unbreakable ice. Titering and near hysterical, I stayed close, leaving to her to quell stoic pains. 

“As if you just did that,” she said when she returned to earth.

“Did that hurt?” I asked, getting up real close to her. She showed me stinging, flushed palms. Inexplicably intertwined in divine unioun, we were star crossed lovers under the stars, and palm in palm is holy palmers kiss.