Journal, Diary, & Blogging / So comes the year of chance
I smoked my last cigarette tonight, though I wasn’t with myself while smoking it. I was projecting myself into the living room of the people who live in the house that’s behind mine through a wall of naked trees. Their lights are always on at night. I tried, at times, to roll the smoke on my tongue so that I might remember it someday when I would no longer be able to have it, because I’m making promises. Promises to, you know, be kind to myself, to not poison myself or stretch myself too thin. I think I’ll thank myself later for making such promises, because I might not want to live much past 40 right now, but when I’m 40, I’ll think myself far too young to die.
I was wondering to myself while I was smoking about who I had imagining myself to be all these 17 and a half years of life that I’ve lived. Who? And in what form? And how had this person changed? I already knew that I didn’t know the answer to any of these questions. And that bothered me. Because, well, if you’d been living in the body of some person for over 17 years, wouldn’t you expect to know them? At least a little bit?
How could I be the exception to this rule?
I watched that family through their back window for a good, long while. It wasn’t the creepy, sketchy kind of watching. Just watching, looking for myself in their actions and interactions. It was a strange thing to be standing in the cold of the night yet feeling none of it, not in my hands or feet or face or heart. I felt that I was with them. With myself, and myself alone, I was with them, turning lights on, and turning them back off again. Watching stars and thinking to myself, “yeah but we’re all dying, I’m dying, I’malive I’mdying I’malive I’mdying.” And a wonderful thing did happen this Christmas Eve, where I stood alone on my deck in the December wind: I sang, quietly, to myself, a Christmas carol, and tasted the smoke between the refrains, and hummed the smoke back out through my nose. Remembering it. Missing it already, yet welcoming its departure.
With each inhalation, I thought of what I was injecting myself with: Arsenic, tar, insecticide, nail polish remover, rat poison, embalming fluid. What an ugly way to die. Uglier than red wrists, a broken neck, seared flesh, or even a freefall without wings. Imagine an envelope of flesh with all the insides scattered and torn. This would not be any uglier than a lung coated in black sludge, or a heart attack. Imagine, if you will, someone’s face rearranged to imitate Picasso in his finest hour, with hair used to stitch the fault lines. Could this be any uglier than breathing from a hole at the base of your neck, a raw portal stuck with different tubes at every hour of the day, gurgling and dribbling blood and spit?
How about the yellow teeth, the burnt tongues, or the hint of fire beneath each fingernail? A slower death? Imagine having to cough up different sections of your own lungs in order to breathe. Imagine tiny holes in the hems of all of your nicest shirts, having to buy new shirts, or the accident of dropping a still-lit butt onto your hand or down your sleeve when trying to toss it out of a car window. Oh, the sting of a burn.
I couldn’t tell if I was rejoicing or mourning with the last puff I took before I smashed the cigarette out in a pile of hardened snow. A mixture of both, probably. To know I was free from it, though; painfully free, I was free at that point to control myself as I saw fit. I marveled at the human body: amazing, how much our bodies can endure. Mine, within the last two years, has taken quite the beating: marijuana, mystery pills, hard liquor, losing weight, bulimia, semi-anorexia, over exercising, more bulimia, harder bulimia, smoking, running, nothing at all, running and smoking, more bulimia, and all the while, diet coke. Aspartame.
So the new year comes, and the new year presents itself with much eloquence, showing in it’s great white hands the kinds of things I might live to see and experience: Love (above all other things, Love), and age (18 this next year, a monumental birthday), and independence (college, jobs, life). If nothing else, these are the things I could cry for, out of joy and thanksgiving. To be alive. To be alive. To live.
With my life spinning around me, I could take off running in all directions, dancing in the open light of the moon, white hot as it is, though I’d never feel it. Hot as it is, I’d never once stop to veil my face, because who’s got the time? Imagine me, one small point in the sky growing larger than the points surrounding, and imagine my laugh coming into your ears from the West, from the mountains and the sea. Imagine my breath the scent of apples and sweet oranges tainting the noses of every sleeping child, my eyes as wide as saucers, glowing with the luminescence that only the dark side of the moon would ever know. Imagine my skin covering yours, a blanket for rest, and I am everywhere, falling with the snow, rising with the sun, breathing with the wind and sleeping with the moon. Imagine that surrounding me is a host not of heavenly, but rather, incandescent bodies: the planets in their orbit around the sun.
And the sun, here, my friends, is the cherry end of the last cigarette ever to be smoked in all of human existence, burning with that sweetly spent odor of filth and dissipated death.
I stubbed out my last cigarette tonight and watched again for life through the trees, though I saw none. In the house hidden by a world of trees, one proudly lit Christmas tree illuminated a tall, wooden room, and smiling to myself, I quietly began to sing, “We wish you a merry Christmas, we wish you a merry Christmas, we wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year…”
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damn I need to give up smoking, rat poison?......I enjoyed the blog , it was well written and interesting, good luck with the no smoking…..Thank you for sharing a part of yourself.
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Throwing away a vice or several is liberating! The slavery is ended! I quit 15 years ago..almost as long as you have been alive! Now, quit throwing up all that good food!
Great thoughts but proofread your work!
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