VINCE

Yesterday our squad had our AARs.  I don’t recall what that acronym stands for but I do know it’s where we turn in our addresses for release to our case manager.

Now it is of my opinion that my mother moved from her apartment to her condo to avoid having to tell (or ask) a landlord for permission to have a felon living in the apartment.  Well, it may still come up.

You see, my mother may own a condo, but somebody else may own the land that it’s on, and they would still have to be informed of my situation.

I only get one phone call every two weeks so I can’t tell her until Sunday but I think she may worry about having to do that.  I suppose I could have waited to write this until I spoke with her but I’m in study hall right now and I’m all caught up with my assignments.

This will all work out.  In fact, everything that I worried about or was afraid of since I arrived at boot camp has worked out just fine.  I look back almost four months when I thought I could never run more than a mile, or go through 182 days without a nap.  Well, the no nap part is still hard some days.  Enough on that.

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Holding it all together.  Almost.  That’s the way I look at the year prior to my arrest in December 2013.

I had a full time job in Lanesboro.  More often than not, I still showed up early and held it together for 11 hours at an outdoor grill working in front of people.  Some days I was able to keep standing only through heavy concentration because I hadn’t slept for days and I had been driving around all night selling drugs.  Being a short-order/line cook is one tough job, and I could still do it but I made a lot of mistakes.  Some nights I would have to look at a ticket over and over because I couldn’t commit it to memory.  I was wasting moves, as we call it.

Arms flying all over the place but not actually doing anything.  So much stress.  Nobody knew about my other life.  Nobody knew that the power was out in my apartment, or that I had to use the bathroom a lot so I could hit my meth pipe to keep going.  Or that I didn’t have vision because I didn’t have any more contact lenses and I literally could not see more than three feet away with any clarity, part of the reason I had to move back and forth so many times to read tickets.

I was a hot mess.  I can’t believe nobody ever asked me what was wrong with me.  But it was all over in mid-October.  At that point I began selling full time and it just got worse.

I spent the next couple months in various hotel rooms so I wouldn’t have to face the music back at my apartment in Fountain.  Hotel hopping, so nobody would see a pattern of in and out, in and out.  All my drug profits went to my personal high, scratch offs, and gas.  And food every now and then if I thought about it.  Somehow, for reasons unknown, I didn’t care.  I didn’t care about me, my family, or my real friends.  And I showed them by abandoning everything.

I am so grateful for this place.  And I’m proud of myself for sticking it out.  Nothing about boot camp is meant to be easy.  And it’s not.  But I have pushed myself harder and farther than I ever have.  Even when nobody else is looking.