HCE received a lot of high-quality submissions for The Green Issue – sadly, too many to fit inside the magazine! So we offered some writers and artists who’d sent in work the chance to be published here on the website. Keep an eye on our social media for more great work like this, now that The Green Issue print magazine has been released! (For more information or to purchase your copy, visit our shop.)
Shane Cassidy
Croatia
I’ve been wandering around the streets of Barcelona repeating the question:
What does green mean to me?
I’ve just finished a 12 hour shift and instead of reflecting on the colour, I find I’m repeating it over and over. As though the depth of the question goes no further than the asking of it. It echoes in my mind, the pleasing rhyming acoustics of green followed by mean providing a relief I can’t quite explain.
Since I read the question, a prompt for a short story, I have inevitably begun to see the colour everywhere. Moments ago outside a bar, a puppy sat under his owner’s chair chewing his green collar. Above the terrace umbrellas, the streetlights illuminate the closest leaves to them. They look wet and lush and lustrous and recall far-off forests and verdure. The morning I read the submission title I also bought a green rug for our living room. Was it a sign of something? I ask myself now, attempting to attach significance to a normal coincidence.
‘What is the colour green supposed to represent?’ I asked Sandra as we jostled for space in front of the bathroom mirror this morning. “Is it harmony?”
‘Peace, isn’t it?’ she said.
I Googled it as I walked into work. Here’s what it said:
‘Green, the colour of life, renewal, nature and energy, is associated with meanings of growth, harmony, freshness, safety, fertility and environment.’
It was quite the list, not exactly succinct. It went on,
‘Green is also traditionally associated with money, finances, banking, ambitions, greed, jealousy and Wall Street.’
The antithesis of the first description then. It felt non-committal, as though it wanted to touch on too many bases.
It may be linked to the noticeable lack of parks in Barcelona, I thought. If green wasn’t exactly harmony, I certainly felt a hormonal disharmony from a lack of green spaces.
Then there was the obvious meaning. The one that has kept reappearing ever since I decided to read the call for submissions page and set eyes on the theme. The one that wraps itself regularly and imperceptibly around my consciousness, like mist moving over a mountain. It’s there but I can’t seem to capture it, evaporating as I try to develop it. The one where green was me.
“Mr Green in the building,” my old housemate would call out as I entered our Dublin home. I’d throw myself on the couch, pull out my grinder, skins, tobacco, and the most important of all, a bag of green. My housemates would wait with polite patience as I rolled, stalling near the end to talk, giddy with anticipation and assured that most of the way was done.
Later in my room. A knock at the door.
“Oh, Mr Green, have you got just enough for me to make a little stick?”
I always did. I’d never take the risk of getting so low as to go without. I had a network in place to be sure of it. A Frenchman with a pacemaker, living in the smart apartments near the tech corporations. Failing that, there was an Irish DJ with large jars of weed hidden behind his record collection. I would think nothing of paying the taxi round trip.
On those rare days where I found myself without green, all work and commitments were abandoned to the sourcing and securing of a bag. We even had our own code.
“Hey man, can I come over after work to listen to some Green Day?”
“Good morning dude, you around later for me to grab a 50 bag?”
My moods hung on tenterhooks awaiting the reply to these messages. When they responded in the affirmative, I was transformed. Pleasant, generous with my time, openly optimistic and enthusiastic. A bag was waiting for me and so all was well with the world.
I just thought of a great ending for this essay. I could say something like: If green symbolises harmony, to me it represented anxiety. It would signify a dramatic finish. The final deep and meaningful line which would encapsulate everything I’ve been trying to express. The harmony and anxiety rhyming has a nice ring to it too. Like I’m delivering the final devastating blow in a rap battle.
The presence of that little green bag in my life transformed how I viewed society. Public toilets took on a new significance. In my desperation to roll a joint, I would use different hotel and public toilets. The ones with a long, wide ledge above the toilet are the best. You have room to take out all your equipment and line them up. If there’s no ledge, you’re left with no option but closing the toilet seat and covering it in toilet paper. Ceiling to floor doors are the holy grail. Enclosed in total privacy, I could take my time to ensure I had a tightly rolled joint. When I was feeling particularly good, I’d roll two. The public toilets where you see people’s shoes on the other side of the door are much more complicated. Not that it stopped me. Strategic coughing sufficed to conceal the crunching of the grinder and the flapping of the skins as I packed them with tobacco and weed. Or perhaps I wasn’t that subtle. But the promise of that first, calming drag insulated me from concerning myself with what those faceless shoe-wearers thought.
At parties or work nights out, I was the guy to go to. At first I would conceal it. Instead of joining people in the smoking area, I would leave the bar and walk around the corner. There, between the parked cars and the calmness of the evening street, I inhaled my medicine. I pulled that safety blanket over me for every social occasion until it began to slowly choke me.
It wasn’t easy, the break up. And that’s how it felt. Mr Green loved his green. For a long time, I loved the association with it. It wasn’t cocaine. It was a natural plant. I wasn’t looking to go lightning fast through life. I wanted to slow everything down. Life felt as though it was passing so quickly and that I was in control of so little. It was as though I was in the passenger seat of my own journey. When I finally took that decision to stop, it was a messy, complicated affair. The first time I attempted it, I waited for my housemates to come home. In that same living room where we shared so many things that I now struggle to recall, I declared that Mr Green was no more.
“I’ve stopped, lads. I need to take a break for a while, but of course I’ll smoke in the future. Just more controlled.”
Just as we promise each other when we break up that we’ll stay friends, the compulsion to deceive myself was present. I needed to believe it. I couldn’t picture a scenario without it. And I was right because within two days my friend with the pacemaker received a message.
“Want to catch up on some Green Day. Around 7pm?”
The next time I tried to quit, I was falling in love with Sandra and I had a sobering moment one night in her apartment. She had accepted me as Mr Green and, as she sat in bed, I rolled a joint on her bedside locker. When I was finished, I walked over to her balcony and began smoking. As she watched me, I encouraged her to take a drag, which she did. Standing barefoot in her pyjamas, blowing smoke through a slightly ajar window, I felt as though I was watching from above. She was offering me a loving future and I was putting tobacco in her lungs.
Of course I finished the rest of the joint but resolved that that was it. I decided not to tell Sandra. Actions spoke louder than words. Better in secret, I told myself, unaware of how self-deception works.
The following day, as the wind whipped up the River Liffey on that stormy early morning, I stood along its banks, determined. I had wrapped everything in a plastic bag. I had decided to make it a ceremonial offering. Holding the plastic bag up to my forehead, I softly spoke a few words which were carried away on that January wind and promised myself I wouldn’t go back. I could feel the cold, soothing, cylindrical shape of the grinder through the bag. The sharp edges of the skins. Finally the bag was in the air, reaching higher and farther than I had in recent months before finally arching down and splashing into the Liffey.
‘It’s gone out of my life now,’ I reassured myself. ‘Oh I’ll smoke again some day, no doubt. At parties or travelling.’
I turned away from the river, tightening my scarf and steeling myself against the oncoming storm.
Shane Cassidy is an Irish writer who lives in Barcelona. Prior to living in Spain, he spent time in South America reading about magical realism and realising his grandmother’s tales in the south of Kerry bore a striking resemblance to them. Shadowy characters, inexplicable events and banshees at the windows populated her stories and now illuminate his imagination.