opheliac

That Finest Narcotic

I lean out the window, clutching a cigarette between index and middle finger in the sassy way I usually enjoy. I have perfected a way of walking which I think of as the “cigarette-strut.” Few things give me more pleasure than to cigarette-strut my way down a busy street, singing Aerosmith under my breath.

I am trying my hardest to cry. It is like trying to wring moisture from a sponge which has been left out on the counter for several days. I wish that it were raining, that I were crying, that I felt cosmic significance.

I take a drag from the cigarette and I taste the fiberglass in the filter and the radiation in the tobacco fertilizer. I hold the smoke in anyway and for an eternal eight seconds I am buzzed. I light a second jack and place it in my mouth and inhale from both at once as deeply as I can.

Ordinarily I would relish the decadence and naughtiness — two jacks at once! — but I feel nothing tonight except for a gnawing in my stomach and a quivering in my hands and a twitching in my eyelids which are struggling with such gusto to squeegee out tears.

Extreme despair, that finest narcotic, exceeds my reach. I am quickly running through the final two cigarettes in my final pack so that even this mild high will soon be out of my reach.

Sobriety always reasserts itself eventually. Every bowl of cannabis eventually furls up its last plume of smoke. A “line” of cocaine is a misnomer — a line, mathematically, lasts forever; so we content ourselves with line segments.