introspective periscope : peeking inside since Y2K ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- up in smoke 8:34 p.m. - 2005-07-13 "i hate you sometimes, but i love to be your queen. you are my muse, got me smoking nicotine."~ani d yeah, so it's started again...not so heavy and not so every-day, but there's a pack sitting on the front porch. it's probably stale with the humidity, but it's there if i so desire. we've got this fat wax candle in a dollar-store glass ashtray...the big heavy kind that you could crack on someone's skull and it's goodnight...sitting on an old trunk. when it's dark, the comfy corner of the porch is pitch and you can hardly see anything except for the glow and fade of the embers on the tip of the cigarettes lighting faintly the white smoke that spills out of our mouths to the air, thinning and disappearing. sometimes, when it's not too hot or buggy, we light the fat wax candle with a cigarette lighter and it casts a soft glow on our flesh. we sit, our knees touching and talk, stopping midsentence to inhale, exhale... it is july and you've been gone since easter and i dwell on this fact often...i dwell on the fact that i've survived this long without you but that not a day goes by without my realizing exactly how many days it's been (108). i think in terms of months of rent. in the number of times i've cleaned the bathroom. in the mornings i've driven to work alone. i think in terms of the times i've vacuumed the carpet, filled the cat's food bowl, changed the sheets. when you were here, it was easy not to want to smoke and the ashtrays were only filled with the butts of the friends who'd come to visit and keep me some company. my friends, realizing this, emptied these ashtrays into blue Giant Eagle grocery bags and disposed of them in the cans behind the house. i was grateful but it was really unnecessary. i think i bought the first pack when i brought that big tin to the coinstar at the grocery store on a semi-whim. the dog had jumped and when she'd come down, she bumped the stove, which, in turn, shook just enough to send the glass milk jug toppling to the floor. i had gotten the milk jug at the food co-op when we went that time, marvelling at the color of lemons with no dye, buying exotic vegetable oils and that half gallon of cream-top milk. we agreed not to buy that kind of milk again and kept the bottle as a reminder, filling it with our mislaid coins for maybe a year. when it broke, it took me two hours to separate the shards and slivers of glass from the coins, dropping them into a tin...the only thing i could find to hold them all. when it was done counting, the machine told me that it had eaten up some thirty five hundred pennies. the total amount that i received was forty nine dollars, minus the ten percent fee for the convenience of the machine. that's a lot of metal we accrued together and i changed it in in less than five minutes, walking out with crisp bills, already spent. jess zemba and i went to the aimee mann concert that same night and before we headed downtown with my newest dog, leah, we stopped at the citgo a block from my house and bought a pack of '72s. they were shorter and seemed less of a risk. we were going to split them. most of the concert went by before we remembered we were going to be smokers for the night and we broke open the pack and lit one apiece. marlboros were always like candy as far as i was concerned and smoking them was asking for trouble. we laughed on the way home and talked ernestly in a way that girlfriends who rarely see each other but whom, for each other, hold strange respects and grant small allowances. we had the sunroof open and the dog slept in the back of the wagon, worn out from the city-venture. she came up to my apartment and i gave her the cd from nacho in kosovo, a dvd she'd made that had me crying in less than five minutes. passing it on, i'd be fufilling nacho's directions. jess and i smoked on the porch for 45 minutes, sipping on iced teas we'd picked up at the wendy's across the river. it was the night that i watched the fireflies in the junkyard next door, their little green glows screaming silently to each other in the weeds and vines and twisted forsaken household items. she left. i kept the pack. it's been two months and i've since bought two more packs. that's not such a bad habit, i suppose, considering that most of the first pack went back to school with you. there's this pack sitting out there right now. an orange box of my usual brand...the brand i write on the surveys...kamel red lights, box. never by the carton except for that one time when i smoked more cigarettes in one week than i even want to think about (200). and you've come home for a night and gone on to your mother's in nashville and i've been left to handle this audit alone, as we discussed...better this way because there's no need to spend our time together like this...with me cranky and tired and stressed with the kind of worry that brings ulcers and vomit and temper. combined with this heat and these storms, i'm convinced we played this out perfectly. my pack of cigarettes sits untouched, even with an audit at work and too many hours put in at the office. the audit ended today and was a complete success. i have them all fooled that i've got it all under control. if they'd had a few more days, maybe, they might have scratched deeper than the surface and it might have all come crashing down, but it wouldn't have been soley my fault. and now, i've got three years to fix everything that went wrong in the three years that came before me. i got good at giving the right answers. so good that my boss even gave me a little bonus: two wooden nickels, a rare acknowledgement of my toils and jobs well done. and now, i've only got four days until your return. and my pack of cigarettes is out there waiting for you to come home. i haven't touched them because i know they'll be the last...or at least, that's what i'll tell myself. i know that we'll spend some nights in that dark corner of our porch talking about my finding someplace else to live...someplace that will take the dogs. we'll talk about what it will be like when you're on the other side of the continent doing this externship. we'll talk about how we're managing to get through this. and i'll want there to be cigarettes. when i think of you, i often think of our first night together and all the cigarettes i smoked over endless games of go fish. when you return to me for these two sacred weeks, i'll want there to be cigarettes. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- .what came before. - .what happened next. a diamond at the bottom of the drain - 20 october 2017 |
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