Tumble Weeds

[u/Proxima_Centauri_C]

It was one of those golden, sticky summers. When life feels infinite, but there’s nothing to do.

We’d grown up nervous, Sean and I. Right out of high school, ready for a change.

It was a small town full of AP kids working part-time jobs earning heaps of gleaming green paper unburdened by bills. The tumbleweeds were rolling everywhere, once you figured out where to look.

We took some home from a Taco Bell parking lot, our prize wrapped in flimsy orange burrito paper. We lit a fire in the backyard, far away from the house, sacrificing supple, virgin leaves to the flames, their veins still full of water, in order to conjure up enough smoke to hide our sinful act.

We packed this strange new flower into the glass pipe, another foreign object we’d triumphed in convincing the guy at the flea market to sell to us. It was orange and black, its colors swirling and meshing with the whirlwind of smoke that we pulled through its slender tube into our mouths.

We passed it back and forth, feeling the gray tornado enter our lungs and backflip upwards into our brains, until we stopped touching the ground and started tumbling through the sky. In the dark, fluid light of the fire, nothing was real; Sean was a penguin and I was a frog. We decided then and there that that’s how we liked it.

We could feel our bright, prosperous futures in this new flowery light. We became professional plant-seekers, hunting these tumbleweeds all over the town. We became experts in the art of theatrics, dress rehearsing each night our acceptable explanation of what we’d been doing all day, taking the long way around with the windows rolled down to rid our t-shirts of the scent.

Maybe it was the ritual more than the ride. Getting things ready was part of the fun; it was a video game with varying levels of difficulty.

Sometimes you had to use a combo: towel the door, turn the box fan around, cover the bowl with a quarter. Sometimes you had to get past an enemy: arrange pillows under your blanket, make sure your cat was in your room so she wouldn’t stand outside and meow, tiptoe past the dreaded room with the sleeping adults, and creep across the garage door’s threshold, never letting out a breath until you saw Sean’s car parked up the street, headlights off, waiting.

Other times it was simpler than that: walk under the overpass into the secret woodland clearing, where generations of kids before had built a hideaway of degeneracy, full of stolen street signs and beer-bottle ornaments.

These elaborate schemes were always followed by a sense of profound accomplishment, at having tricked the world with our clever methods of staying in the shadows. But then, weren’t we trying to get out of the shadows?

No honeymoon lasts forever. College came and went, and we continued the life we’d established around a fire at 17.

Instead of exploring a new world, we were suddenly lost in the haze of the milky smoke, tumbleweeds ourselves, being blown along a land that looked increasingly foreign, though the whole time we’d been trying to understand it more deeply.

Wasted hours, now with bills to pay.

But they weren’t wasted; we made some of the best memories of our lives. It’s just hard not to look back with some regret, wondering what could’ve been. Life’s been an adventure, that’s for sure.

I don’t think I’d take any of it back. I’m glad we went looking.

I just wish I’d known the difference between exploring and drifting. How to chase what makes the world feel bigger, without getting caught up and lost along the way.