Lifetimes

Late this evening, I went on a holy quest to find the ever elusive one-hitter-that-looks-like-a-cigarette that every stoner has stashed away -somewhere- among their belongings. Mine, last I saw, was in a box in the closet of my spare room.

While rummaging through the box I thought I had seen it in, I stumbled across an envelope that was addressed to my old apt in Louisville, written in my grandmother's handwriting. Curious, I opened it and was shocked to discover the last letter my ex-fiancee ever wrote me: 8 months after he had been arrested, out of nowhere, for 8 counts of armed robbery- and was still sitting in jail, awaiting his fate. USPS had stamped the envelope with November 2004.

Even though my brother was over, I snuck into my bedroom to spark a bowl and read over the letter... and wow. Just wow. I forgot how educated he was... how articulate and well-spoken. It's kind of a lame analogy, because I don't have his way with words, but he always reminded me of a ribbon dancer... a really good one, ya know? But his ribbons were -words-. His IQ was well above "genius", and he had frighteningly perfect school records to show for it.

But as I continued to read onto the back of the first page, and into the second... he talked briefly about memories of us, made references to events in our lives that I had completely forgotten. I read and re-read what he had written, searching desperately for the memories attached to the names, to the places, to the dates... and one by one, I finally grasped single images and fleeting voices, ghosts of distant memories stored in the closet of the spare room of my mind...

I pulled them out, dusted them off, and immersed myself in them once again. I revisited those times, and those places.

And now I'm just in shock, at how only 4 years have passed in my life... and yet those events of just 4 short years ago feel like they happened to an entirely different person.

Those memories -aren't- mine. They're foreign... familiar, but alien. I remember the feelings, I can feel them now. I remember the smells, the sounds, the sights. It has to be real.

But they're not mine.

... and I never found my one-hitter, either.