Peace of mind… is easy to find? Not, but apparently is easily underrated, like Lana del Rey. How about true happiness? For a guy that has it all and a brain without the ability to focus, something always seems to be missing. Have you ever felt truly at peace with no worries in your head and the feeling that you could die right then and there and everything would be alright? Well, of course you didn't, that's why you killed yourself. “Jack, are you talking to C.R. again?”, said my friend P as she passed the joint. “What if she's really listening?”, I said while holding my breath full of brown, before slowly letting the smoke out from left to right, left to right. P was my best friend during high school and the one I would sneak to the roof with during Civics. “I don't think she WANTS to listen, otherwise she would still be here wearing necklaces instead of a noose…”, she said while extending her hand. “Shut up and smoke”, I said as I handed her what would be roughly translated to English as “little cow” (vaquita in Spanish… or was it bachita?), the smallest smokable divisor of the joint, that is, except “1”, the filter, duh. The truth is we both missed C.R. and we both lit our cigarettes. “Are you ready”, asked P. I smiled and said “obvs bitch, I'm the one who showed you.” I never know if you should capitalize the first word after the quotation marks if you wrote something outside the quote before, like it's the beginning of the sentence, but the spoken sentence and capital letters are meant for written language not oral. We each held the cigs up to the sun, vertically with the lit end on top, so that the white engulfed it from every angle. Synchronizingly, we flipped it upside down, lowered it to our bare legs, looked at each other and, without shifting our gaze, gently put them out, each on our left calf. Yeah we do that sometimes. It's not like we're depressed and want to kill ourselves like C.R. did. She was actually the first person I knew to kill herself. We just liked to do it because I discovered that sometimes, just sometimes, there is too much going on inside your mind that you feel disconnected to reality and find yourself in desperate need of a tether, something to remind you to feel. My excuse? I have ADHD since for as long as I can remember. I'm easily distracted and never get tired, bodywise and mindwise. It's like someone long ago started a motorboat engine in my mind, caught some weird timeless momentum and became a uniformly accelerated rectilinear object or whatever. It doesn't even stop while I'm dreaming, I suffer from extremely vivid and sometimes lucid dreams. I tend to confuse dreams with memories, they are so strong I sometimes believe they happened and I get wildly disoriented. P's excuse? Things at home have been wild for her. Her parents are going through a nasty divorce and her sister is having an affair with our teacher. So yeah, sometimes we like to feel alive by putting out our cigs on our legs. Arms would work too, but they are so public. The bell rang with that characteristically nasty loud pitch. Why does every school on Earth needs an annoying bell to signal the beginning and end of classes? Why not use a pleasurable sound? Has anyone thought school experiences might improve if someone changed that Godforsaken sound? P and I lowered our pants to cover the marks, threw the cigarettes over to the parking lot and headed to Math. We were completely stoned so I decided to take a mini nap during class, to which the teacher replied: “Jack, why are you not participating this time? You always get extra points” “I'm not feeling well”. I think Mr. M actually likes me. He is always amazed at how Math just flows through me, even though I almost never pay attention to him. He is also certain I give my friends the answers to his tests during the tests, but he has never discovered how. It's actually quite simple: I grab extra pages for “operational purposes”, solve the exam quite fast and on those pages designated for detailing my operations I solve the exam all over again in a slightly different way than mine. Then, I drop those pages at the same time as one of my friends drops theirs and he or she just picks them all up and voilà. I realized I found an unspoken rule of teaching: if a student is doing really well in a class, the teacher will grant him or her more privileges than other students. I actually don't like Mr. M so I enjoy torturing him like this. I think he is a self-centered misogynistic prick who gets off by showing off his so-called rapid mental calculation and by fucking P's sister. Going to school in Mexico City can be one of the best unintentional social experiments.