The weed helped.
Not fixed. Not healed. Not addressed the underlying structural damage that no amount of THC could reach. But it tamed the demons. Invited a calm that the void couldn’t provide and the medication couldn’t replicate—a softer, warmer version of silence that didn’t feel like emptiness but like rest. A genuine, temporary tranquility that lowered the volume on the constant, grinding broadcast of threat assessment and survival calculation that occupied my conscious mind from waking to unconsciousness.
The cigars served a different function. They tasted like wealth—like the empire I was born to inherit and chose to abandon,like the boardrooms and the penthouses and the particular brand of power that operates through mahogany desks and leather chairs and the slow, deliberate consumption of things that cost more than most people earn in a month. Smoking a cigar was a way of touching that world without re-entering it. A sensory postcard from a life I chose not to live.
Designated portions.
The weed for peace.
The cigars for remembrance.
Each one filling a compartment in a system that my body and mind required to function.
I’m not an addict. Not in the clinical sense—not dependent, not compulsive, not organized around the procurement and consumption of substances in a way that disrupts my capacity to function. I can go days, weeks, without either and suffer nothing beyond a vague, unfocused irritability that might be withdrawal or might just be my default personality.
Probably the latter.
But these quiet moments?—
These are different.
These moments, when it’s just Hawk and me in this room with the vinyl playing low and the window cracked and a blunt passing between us in a rhythm that requires no coordination because we’ve done it enough times that the exchange is second nature—these moments are the closest thing to peace I have access to. Not happiness. Not contentment. Something less ambitious than either. Just the temporary absence of war. The brief ceasefire between my nervous system and the world it’s perpetually defending against.
Significance.
This is what significance feels like.
Not the grand, cinematic kind.
The quiet kind.
The kind that happens when you stop fighting long enough to sit next to someone and not say anything and have that be enough.
He lights the blunt. The flame from his Zippo—battered, silver, engraved with something in a language I’ve never been able to identify—catches the tip and produces a thin curl of smoke that rises toward the cracked window and slips through the gap into the night air. The first drag is his, the way it always is—a deep, slow inhale that engages his entire respiratory system, his scarred chest expanding as the smoke fills his lungs. He holds it for a count of four, then releases in a measured exhale that turns the thin stream into a diffuse cloud that the evening light transforms into something almost beautiful.
He passes it to me.
Our fingers overlap on the wrap, his calloused tips warm against my cold knuckles, and the transfer is seamless—no fumbling, no adjustment, just the practiced geometry of two hands that have been exchanging objects in the dark for three years.
We settle.
Him on the bed beside me, his back against the headboard, his long legs stretched out across the dark gray sheets. Me tucked against his side, my head finding the hollow of his shoulder where the muscle meets the collarbone—a space that my skull fits into with an anatomical precision that I refuse to interpret as meaningful but that my body interprets as home. His skin is warm against my temple. The scent of pine and smoke and iron fills my nostrils with each breath, layered now with the sweeter, herbier fragrance of the weed that softens its edges into something less predatory.
The red envelope sits between us on the bed like a third party to a conversation that hasn’t started yet.
We share the blunt in silence.
Back and forth, the rhythm unconscious, the exchanges occurring at intervals that neither of us counts but both of us feel. Inhale. Hold. Release. Pass. The smoke accumulates in the room despite the cracked window, creating a thin haze that softens the edges of the furniture and the shadows and the thin seam of evening light until the entire bedroom looks like a photograph taken through a filter designed to make real life appear more dreamlike than it actually is.
The weed kicks in around the halfway point.
I feel it arrive—not suddenly, not with the sharp onset of medication or the clinical efficiency of Hawk’s injections, but gradually, like warm water filling a vessel from the bottom up. My muscles soften. The persistent, low-grade tension that lives in my shoulders and my jaw and the spaces between my ribs unclenches by degrees, each increment producing a corresponding decrease in the volume of the internal broadcast that normally runs at full capacity from the moment I open my eyes to the moment I close them.
Quiet.
Genuine quiet.
Not the void’s silence—not the echoing, empty nothing that passes for my emotional baseline.
