My time on Earth

While I was visiting the planet Earth, I was trying to experience a normal human existence as much as I could. I went to college, made friends. My best friend from college, a guy called John, asked me to be his flatmate when we graduated. Once he'd explained that this meant sharing a flat and nothing as sinister as I was thinking, I agreed. He knew that I wasn't human so it made sense to live with someone who understood and could help explain things to me.

A few years later, we met this girl. Her name was Lucy. John assured me she was strange, although most humans were strange to me so I hardly noticed. In time, she became my second best friend. I never understood the reason why they were the "best" of my friends, except, possibly, because they were my only friends. John became her mate. He tells me it makes him uncomfortable when I call him that but that's what he was so there you go. By this time I had a job as a waiter at a local restaurant. It wasn't hard mentally, but it gave me a chance to study humans without seeming odd.

John and Lucy had reservations at the restaurant that night. I had become accustomed enough to their behaviour to notice when they arrived that they were acting strange. John's pupils were dilated unnaturally, and he was staring around the room and swatting at the air. He kept talking to people who were not there or touching things no one else could see. Lucy was shaking with laughter and finding it hard to breathe.

I watched as they were shown to their table. I was their waiter. I headed for their table as soon as I could.

"John, what is the problem?" I asked, laying out menus.

"He...haha...he is...hahahah," Lucy tried several times to explain the situation but I eventually sensed that she wasn't going to get it out.

"Fascinating," I murmured as I walked away.

I watched them all night. I was trying to calculate the variables that had caused this change in behaviour for my friend. He didn't seem to be in any danger or pain so I felt free to watch him without intervention.

Throughout the night he continued to behave oddly. He picked up a spoon and held it very close to his eye before holding it at arms length and whispering to himself. He then dropped it, laughing hysterically. He tried sitting on his chair in a multiple of unusual ways, resulting in his falling off of it onto the floor several times. He ate all of the food on his plate, then all of the food on Lucys plate, then some food off of other customers' plates and some off of the waiters' trays. It was at this point that he was escorted from the premises, shouting "I have peed my pants, friends!" In pride.

Lucy watched all of these events shaking with laughter that was sometimes loud and sometimes silent but always occurring. When they were escorted out, she was holding a napkin, bent over and crying with laughter.

When I asked the next morning Lucy gave me an explanation that had the words "trippin' balls" and "magic mushrooms" and "bad batch" in them. But as I could make no sense of what she was saying I resolved to ask John as soon as he stopped emptying his stomach in the bathroom.