…after being forced out of our home, my mother, sister, and I moved in with my grandmother in the west suburbs, and I effortlessly snuggled into a deep depression.  I laid in my bed for most of the day, everyday for almost a year.  I went to school sometimes, but coasted through in a daze, except for the occasional panic attack when I would leave abruptly and walk home to the relative safety of my melancholy.  Then one day, during my sophomore year a strange boy called my name as we got off the bus.

To this day, I don’t know how he knew my name or where I lived, but he knew both and for what ever reason decided we were kindred spirits and should hang out.  Normally, I would have been paranoid and/or pissed, but the veil of depression is a thick one so instead I was mildly confused when the kindhearted stranger asked, “So you wanna go pull some tubes?”  For some reason I acquiesced, and so most afternoons from that point on were spent smoking bongs with Bob and Tommy Simon.

…and so it was, that one fateful Saturday morning I found myself sitting on a couch getting high with Justin Jay and the Simon brothers when Ms. Simon came in and decided it was, “time to move!”  Apparently, she had purchased the house two-doors-down from the one in which we were sitting, and the four teenage boys in the circle were now to become a small labor force.  It’s possible there had been some discussion of this event prior to that moment but…

So we proceeded to move  the entire contents of their home from the big house on the corner, to the new house with a pool two-doors down.  It took us all day, and once we had finished moving their mother and sister’s things into the upper floor of the new house and all of the Simon brother’s things into its apartment-like-basement, we christened their new home by getting high.  We smoked late into the evening and when Jay finally went home, Bob said to me, “you know what?  you’re cool man, if you wanna crash here you can,” and then, “Really, anytime you wanna crash you’re welcome to.”

I didn’t go home for three years…

Ms. Simon, a forward-thinking-ex-hippie, had no problem with us getting high as long as her sons were at home while they did it, and no one was drinking, doing hard drugs, or driving.  So the Simon basement became our base of operations for the foreseeable future.  At first, it was just the half a dozen kids from our neighborhood, but soon others began to come; sporadic visitors that shared our “mindset,” became regulars and we soon found ourselves with our own community of misfits.  We didn’t all like the same music, or enjoy the same activities; we didn’t dress alike or talk alike or even think alike, but we had one thing in common…

A “dark Spark,” as Bob so eloquently put it one night while inebriated beyond belief.  Essentially, what we shared was an awareness that most young people lack, of the trauma life can be capable of dishing out unconditionally.  This, paired with a genuine but seemingly impossible desire to find our place in a world that had rejected us so many times, and in so many ways.  We possessed a vagarious wisdom and a cynical joie de vivre; we were the reluctantly enlightened…

…and we accepted each other for who each of us was as a damaged but whole person.  Sure, at times we were just a bunch of teenagers up to no good, but other times we listened, we council-ed and consoled each other, and sometimes just knowing that you have somewhere safe to go, somewhere in this sick cruel world where you can be your true-self without judgment, is all God is.