My first memories of my dad all involve the smell of his small, red tin which carried a smell I was too young to understand. I remember him sitting on a couch rolling something in a paper and I remember this sweet and musty smell that came off of him when he came back. I remember how much more I loved him when he had that smell on him.
I started smoking weed when I was 14 years old. I’d found dad’s plants drying in his shed and on impulse I stored some in a ziplock bag and hid it far behind our country home under a stone I used to sit on while I was thinking of robots and dinosaurs. I forgot about it until that summer when two of my friends and I decided to smoke it.
We rolled the entire bunch into a cone crafted of computer paper. Thinking of it now it was probably an ounce of weed. The whole paper seemed to go up in two or three enormous blazes that washed away my childhood and, as I thought, turned me into a man.
In the years that followed I found that having weed on me made people like me. Smoking weed seemed to make me funnier and my list of friends grew. That was the beginning of teaching myself to value my worth based on how much grass I had at any given time.
I loved the feeling. I loved how art didn’t seem abstract when I was stoned. Colors, shapes, lines were all I could see and it was enough for me.
My deployment was the first time that I had to be away from my security blanket. I hated it. I picked up running because I could feel the weed burning out of my cells. I could smell it on the Jamaicans that virtually ran the base. I asked them about getting some often but it was strictly against their code to share with soldiers as we could lose everything for them.
When I got home my mom, grandma and sister picked me up from the armory and took me out to dinner. I couldn’t even be bothered to act like I wanted to be with them. All I wanted was weed. I drove almost 300 miles that night. All over the state of Michigan looking for what I thought I needed. I finally found it.
That night I smoked with friends I’d had before I left and I realized that I wasn’t the same but they were. I got so scared I didn’t know what to do. So I smoked some more and soon I didn’t give a fuck about our differences.
That was the beginning of a true addiction for me. I never took the time to try to figure out why I felt different. I just kept smoking. I don’t know when I forgot why I was doing it and started instinctively medicating myself. I never took the time, despite being so “aware of myself.”
I had learned in a very deep way that weed was a way to make the gap between me and the people around me smaller. When I was angry because I’d been slighted, forgotten, ignored, looked over I smoked without thinking about it and soon I just forgot and rolled on happy to have any friends at all. When I was nervous that my words, my posture, my face, my inflection put people off I smoked and came back easier to deal with, without questioning why it was always me who had to change. But most importantly, when I started to remember all the things I had done and seen and could no longer tolerate the atmosphere inside of my mind I smoked so that I could see the colors outside of my head again.
Eventually a day came when all of the things I’d been hiding from myself made me feel like such an alien that I decided to quit. Not weed. I quit life. I quit my job. I quit my girlfriend Jaime who loved me in such a pure way that I never felt worthy of. I quit my friends who I was sick of feeling so far from, yet so understood by them. I packed up my life and moved away. But I had weed in my pocket. And when I questioned my decisions I smoked and the questions left me for a while.
As the tensions grew between friends as my lifestyle pushed their acceptance to the brink I was oblivious. I thought they liked me because I was fun and I was always extremely hurt when they asked me to go. Until I smoked weed. Then I didn’t give a fuck. Fuck em. Right?
I learned not to share my grass. I learned that I *needed* it. Without it my reasons to live were few.
It never mattered how beautiful my work was, or how important the things I had done with my life were. I had to find my next fix. I didn’t have time to enjoy things.
I spent a month in an apartment in Germany by myself. I had a beautiful veranda that overlooked a wonderful town but somehow I didn’t care. I couldn’t find weed and thusly the whole month was a wash. This is how I wasted some of the best experiences of my life.
For the last three years I have wanted nothing more than to go back to Europe to be with Nina, whom I had fallen in love with in a way that I could not quit. I could never afford the ticket. But I could always afford weed. Now the distance and time between us is so great I have doubts that she could still love me. She seems sometimes to love me like a friend who is concerned about me. But I worry she no longer loves me like I do her.
Now, three days into quitting marijuana, I have a hard time seeing the future. I don’t know what will carry me through. I don’t know what to turn to. And worst, I feel as if emotions which have been hiding and growing inside of me since my childhood, since my deployment, since all the friends I grew apart from disappeared are just now starting to emerge and they have grown to terrible dimensions. I am having a lot of “suicidal ideation”. I feel like getting back at all the people who have let me down. I feel so much anger. At my dad. At the friends who let me down. But mostly at me.
If I had all that time back. If I had all that money back. If I’d only….
Maybe I’d be with Nina today.
But I’m not.
So maybe tomorrow.
The Paper Trail 