Just another tradition
by hannah polk, contributor
Madi always makes brunch for her four roommates on Sundays.
Not every Sunday, of course, because they are not her roommates anymore, and she only visits a few times during the semester. But on the weekends she does make the trip from Saskatoon to Regina, she makes brunch for the four boys she used to live with. She is fighting a gnarly hangover, running on two hours of sleep, and has work at 1 p.m., but she still makes sure her friends are fed.
They are her family.
She reminds them of this frequently, especially since her dad left and she had a falling out with her mom.
Her long, light brown hair is tied up in a messy bun as she takes turns pouring the batter into the waffle-maker and taking hits from her vape.
“It’s just a habit at this point,” she says, inhaling the watermelon-flavoured nicotine.
The only habit her doctor would approve of is how often she goes to the gym.
She is proud she can now do two pull-ups. Two and a half if she takes a bong rip right before attempting a pull-up on a bar mounted to the kitchen doorframe in the Regina house.
Madi tried to quit vaping last December, using nicotine gum to wean herself off the cravings, but after one stressful weekend of picking up things from her mom’s house, she found herself back at the vape shop buying a new one.
Weed, though, she has never even bothered trying to quit.
“It helps with the migraines at night,” she says, shuffling from one side of the kitchen to the other in her fluffy pink house coat. “And the scaries.”
The ‘scaries,’ as she defines it, is the fear of something bad happening. Those type of scaries happen at night, usually when she is alone, just before bed.
Madi often accounts how, if she has the scaries, she won’t be able to sleep. Disturbing thoughts will race through her mind, with no one in her Saskatoon house she can turn to for comfort.
If she can, and if they are awake, she will try to Facetime one of the Regina boys for reassurance and a distracting conversation. But if it is too late at night, or no one answers, she will resume taking numerous hits of her weed pen until she is quite literally unconscious.
Scaries can happen during the day, too, although they are different, she says.
“You feel like you should be doing something, but you don’t know what, so then you just do nothing,” she explains as she adds five strips of bacon to a sizzling pan.
This debilitating feeling, regarded as laziness by others, is what often keeps Madi in bed until 3 p.m. Not sleeping, she lays awake all day, curled up under a mountain of blankets, scrolling on social media using her comfort shows on Netflix as background noise.
She can get up, though, and she does.
To make her family brunch on Sundays.
