Simple

The simple facts: Had I known, would I have participated? Like when I got my cat. If someone said "Your Dad will be dead before your cat", would I not have gotten her? Does one thing have to do with the other?
If you would have told me before I took that first puff of weed that, less than a decade later I’d be hung up in rehab. Looking for answers from places with names like “Promises” and “Hope for Life”. Would that knowledge, a real knowledge, not an uncertain, wavering, I can contest that, pissant, fourteen-years-olds excuse for knowledge but real knowledge, have precluded me from taking that first hit? From successively seeking it out at seemingly every turn in the few years thereafter?

I know that feeling my father must have used to have. I keep feeding my cat treats, woefully afraid that it is at least the primary, if not the only, reason she loves me and that if I stop she will cease loving me. That’s why he incesssanlty bought me ice cream. He was buying love, paying it forward. And I’m afraid any love I showed him he figured was because of the oreo.