Half the story

Life is fucking crazy man. All these memories come shuttling back into your mind at moments that catch you unaware. Moments ago I was in my bedroom folding laundry next to my big bed with the windows open and blue sky like a portrait hanging on the old, blurred glass. In a wink of nothing I was 20 years younger and standing in my bedroom in an apartment here in this same city. It was my first real apartment away from home where I paid rent and everything. I was living with two girls who were students at the university. The room was very similar to this one, high ceilings, large windows that opened up nearly from floor to the ceiling. Propellers of a ceiling fan whirring above the bed. I had a writing desk at that time, some huge artist's-type drafting table made of hardwood. In the mornings I used to wake and rub my eyes and come out of my beer and marijuana-induced coma that at the time passed for sleep. I wore shorts, no shirt. My long hair fell down past my shoulders and I was thin then. I'd drink some water, brush my teeth. Then I'd load the hookah with sticky green buds of marijuana and begin my day by inhaling and exhaling long columns of smoke. The witchy vapor would swirl in the sunlight streaming in the picture window. It would catch motes of dust in the haze and drift with the breeze floating in through the open window. I'd settle down at my desk and write for an hour or so...until the feeling left me. By this time it would be lunch so I'd skateboard down to the corner gas station and buy a couple of 22oz. beers (malt liquor usually) double deuces of green hornet. Carrying my precious cargo back to my pad in brown paper bags I'd settle into an afternoon of sipping beer and hitting the hookah before heading out on my motorcycle to my job where I worked as a cook at a local restaurant on the shore of the massive man-made lake in the suburb where I grew up.

Today I'm in another apartment, the same high ceiling, the same fan whirring above the bed, the same sun painting the antique glass of the bedroom windows in the hundred-year-old house. The stoner boy was thousands of lifetimes ago, thousands upon thousands. His life had yet to even begin. The future stretched out like an empty canvas, a blank sheet of paper in his journal where life had yet to write its story. Decades later some of the story has been written. He carries more weight in the world, both figuratively and literally. The long locks of chestnut brown hair have been shorn. A bright crown of silver spikes now crowns his head in a tell-tale testament to the years that have passed. The parents he once tried to push out of his heart he now holds close. There'll be no beer for lunch, no hits of weed to calm his nerves. There will only be life, reality in its pure, tragic, comic and unblemished rawness. The sun sends rays shining through the glass and a cool Spring breeze blows and drifts in through the open window. Half the story may be told, but half the story remains unwritten.