It’s around 12:40 p.m. on Nov. 3.

An anonymous student talks about her past relationship on a walk towards 7/11. But this isn’t typical teenage gossip – she’s talking about how her ex-boyfriend’s drug use impacted her. She’d always known that her ex-boyfriend smoked marijuana. But she never would have thought that he’d choose drugs over her.

When he wouldn’t talk to her, she called his mother who said that the problem was marijuana. She was concerned – not with the fact that he used drugs, but because his motivation behind drug use was to escape his life.

“I don’t think you should use anything to escape your life. Instead of confronting what was bothering him he just wanted to like escape,” she said. “And smoking weed to escape – I don’t think that’s the right reason to smoke.”

She’s vaguely mentions his reasons for the increase in marijuana use, but she said that she thinks he suffered from a mental health disorder. Their relationship became strained because of his marijuana use, yet she could never judge him for it. The knowledge that he did drugs never impacted her overall perception of him, but she sticks to that notion that escaping reality should never be the dominant reason for substance use. In the end, she broke up with him – not because of his drug use, but because he rarely talked to her anymore. But when he used LSD, she saw him change.

“Just after I broke up with him he wouldn’t speak to me [but then] he contacted me and was like – well he got his phone taken away by the cops so he contacted me through his friends’ phone,” she said. “He did LSD and he realized that he loved me on LSD and he told me that he loved me … and things like that. LSD made him realize that he wanted me but it turns out he didn’t want to change.”

She doesn’t talk more about him, or how his phone was confiscated by the cops. She’s no stranger to drugs either, but she says that watching someone so close to her spiral down that pathway to drug abuse has taught her to be cautious about her own use. But in the end, he’s just someone she used to know. Parting with a quick ‘bye,’ she joins a friend to grab some food at the cafeteria.