My First Cigarette

Okay, writing this post, again.

I'll probably keep rewriting this post until the day I die.

Which may very well be today.

Go for the tragic waif much, `phfina?

Yep.

You remember your firsts, don't you? We all do, don't we. They are like milestones (millstones?) in our lives. Why is that?

I remember my first time. Not that time. Of course I remember that time. I'm talking about my first cigarette.

I was ... oh, I don't remember, actually, as it's coming up, on Oh, my God! 20 years now, because I was 7 or 8 or 9 when I had my first cigarette, don't you know.

What does that say about me? A girl, smoking before her first time, and first period, and first ... well, everything, right? A girl smoking that early in life? Well, girls like that don't turn out well.

That's what you're thinking, isn't it? It's okay, you can fess up, although you won't, being far to polite to be honest, even to yourself.

Me, I get really fucking real with myself, every morning, right in front of the mirror. Yep, there's me.

You should try it sometime: getting really honest with yourself. I like honest people. A lot. And it's really freeing, seeing yourself, exactly as you are, and exactly as you aren't. It clears your eyes and your head.

So you can see everything that way, too.

Scary, that: seeing things as they are.

I get ahead of myself.

My first cigarette.

So, one day, out of nowhere, my mom's sister visits us. That would make her my aunt ('ayhnt'). I didn't know I had aunts on my mom's side. You see, stereotypes are there for a reason, 'cause stereotypes point to a reality. Irish? We die fast, before our time, and violently. All my aunts and uncles on my mom's side? Dead. And not through natural causes ... unless you count the bottle as a natural cause. But gambling and drinking and fighting and violence can lead to a quick end.

So, this aunt comes and visits us, and I had absolutely no idea what to make of her, because she wanted to make nice with her niece, and I was not having any part of this stranger strangling me in a bear hug.

We started off wonderfully.

So, mom and aunt ... who had a name. Had. Cathy. Aunt Cathy. They go off on a walk and talk and ... what? reminisce? about the good old days where their Dad would beat them? and their brothers? ('Brothers'? How many brothers? Meaning: uncles! That I never got to meet) and how their Mom would get so drunk she ...

Hoo, boy! Happy-happy, joy-joy! That's us Irish! Oh, yeah!

So I was sneaking along behind them in their walk in our poor town in CT, one of the poorest States in the union, trying to be inconspicuous, and I guess I was, because Aunt Cathy takes out a cigarette and lights it, and ...

And I will never forget this, even though I've repressed it for a decade.

And gives one to Mom, who lights up, inhales deeply ... gratefully ... and breathes out a cloud of smoke that wreaths her head.

I didn't know Mom smoked.

I didn't know Mom smoked.

I ...

And in that very moment. Right then.

That's when it happened.

That's when I discovered 'right and wrong' and 'us and them' and ... well, everything else when the world is ripped apart and you're left standing on one side of a chasm, looking down into the abyss, and that voice, that voice you never, never, never had until right now, right this instant, pipes up very, very quietly in your ear, and whispers those poisonous words.

That's not right,

She's saying it to me, right now, as I'm writing through my tears. She, her, me. In my voice, is telling me: 'that's not right.'

... And Mom and Aunt Cathy, God rest her soul ... (we Irish say that) ... walked along, and Mom sucked her cigarette down to nothing, but Aunt Cathy carelessly tossed hers aside ... she had packs to spare. Packs.

And they walked along, and I snuck along behind, until I reached that cigarette.

And I stopped.

And I looked at it. Lipstick on the filter. (Lipstick! How shockingly sinful!) ... that's me: little puritan bitch already! Pristine condition, smoldering on the grass.

And I picked it up, as I say Aunt Cathy, no: Mom, hold it, and I put it to my mouth, ...

And I drew it in.

It.

That's what 'it' tastes like: bitter, acidy, tart, burnt.

I didn't cough. No. I took that smoke into my being.

It matched. 'It.' The smoke. Sin.

... and my soul.

Do you know what happened that day? No: that hour of the morning?

I do.

It's funny, what one little thing can do to a person. Do you know Viktor Frankl? He's probably one of the greatest minds of our century. You should know him: you've read The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt, right? So you remember how Viktor Frankl was teaching philosophy at Cambridge and two boys wanted to take his class, so he wrote something down in Ancient Greek and asked them to critique.

Of course, the boys had to know what it said first, right?

Well, anyway, Vickor Frankl, a good German Jew, was interned at a concentration camp during WWII, and one day, he was standing in line, and the guy next to him was slightly out of place, so it make Viktor look out of line.

So the German guards beat him.

You know what happened then?

Viktor Frankl developed this entire philosophy. He tried to see reason in all this insanity, and then he went "AHA!" for he realized that he was trying to see reason.

And so he wrote a very little, thin book: "Man's Search for Meaning."

Read it. You already have, because it's shaped how everybody in this post-modern era sees the world. So you ... 'should' read it to know what's pulling your strings all the time, and why.

So, anyway, his title says it all, and the hundred pages after that (inside the book) explain that.

A story that touched my heart when I read it in the book, although I didn't know why at the time, being all of 15 when I read it (yes, I was a 15-year-old girl reading philosophy books. Go ahead and think more about me in that light) (Go ahead and say it, if you dare to be honest to yourself) was that inmates could tell who would be dead in their cots the next day.

All you had to do is see somebody light up.

You see, cigarettes were the only money in that prison camp. You traded them for a deeper dip of the soup, so you had just enough protein not to fall over (and then be very shortly dead) while being worked. You traded them so they guards wouldn't beat you as much. You traded them for things in the black market. But your cigarettes? You never, never smoked them.

Unless you gave up. That very second, and you were ...

... Well, Frankl doesn't say it, but I just put it together. You were taking your smoke before the firing squad.

One final smoke before you gave up the ghost.

And, invariably, you did. Every single time Viktor saw somebody smoking, the very next day, the guy didn't get up from his cot, because all that was left was a few pounds of flesh to be disposed of in the incinerator.

Do you know what?

You'll never guess, so I'll tell you.

But after I tell you this.

Viktor Frankl, and his little book that has literally shaped the world?

It's wrong. Man. Heh, `phfina: 'Man.' Man is a meaning-making machine.

That's all he is. ('He').

(I'm fucking talking like Viktor Frankl, for God's sake).

But reality.

Here it comes, ladies and gentlemen.

Reality is just there. There is no meaning in reality. It's just there. And it doesn't care. It doesn't care about your meanings and your meaning-making. It just goes on and on and on. A million years from now, no: a thousand, no: one hundred.

One hundred years from now, everything you know, and care about, and cried over, or where callous and got scarred 'forever' from your own callousness, everything. You, your parents, your lover, your children, will be dead and buried and gone, and nobody, nobody will care one wit whether you lived or died (because you did) or wrote or sang or loved or cared or cried.

Nobody.

And then, moving beyond that. The world is you, right? Well, the rest of reality could care less about you. You think a zebra is thinking about you and your grades at school as its neck is being torn out by a lion on the hunt? You think the hyenas care about you and your job when they steal that kill from the lion, ripping apart the still bleating zebra?

Reality doesn't care that my mom smoked that day, and reality doesn't care what I thought about it.

But man is a meaning-making machine.

So, look at you. You are so trapped, making meaning out of this entry, because that's all you can do, and you even make meanings around making meaning, and you try to make that meaning-making reality.

But it's not. It's maya. It's chimera. It's dust. Dust to dust.

And that's where all your hurt come from. Listen to me. That's why you cry and cry and cry, because reality's there, but you say, 'but ...'

But you say 'but ...' and that's where all your pain and sin and agony comes from. From you crossing the ford with the dam just up the river broken, but 'I have to get to the other side ..." and why? "Well, because ..."

"Well, because ..."

Listen to all the time you say 'because' and listen to your context. Which isn't reality at all, it's a way of seeing, and a way of not seeing, so you can't even see what's right in front of you until you get gobsmacked by a mack truck that is what reality is.

BLAM!

And the following up phrase: "You're dead." And fade to black and curtains.

But no curtain call for you.

You know what happened to me that day? That day that little girl of seven or eight or nine had her first cigarette?

That was the day I died. No, really. I did. I died.

And all that is left now is this thing. This thing a walking shadow, drifting right through life, right past life, saying 'that isn't right,' and wondering why, wondering why things are the way they should be and i want my mommy i want my mommy i want my mommie bak.

Is this mom's fault? No.

Is this Aunt Cathy's fault, God rest her soul, the fucking bitch, for giving my mom that poisonous stick-snake and killing me KILLING ME!

GOD! It's so easy to say yes, but that's my lie, right? That's my payoff, or, more accurately: my copout.

No, it's not Aunt Cathy's fault, may she sleep with the angels and rest in peace.

No, the fault is that little girl, right there, sneaking along behind her mom, want to grow up and be just like her, and look what happened.

Look what happened.

I grew up.

And I wonder. Am I just like her, so nervous, so caring, so wanting the best for her daughter, and so afraid to say one word about anything but having this huge cloud of meaning floating above her head that you could speak to her because you had to speak, not through, but to it?

I wonder.

she

she

she didnt want me. she

ogod

she didn't want children, and i came along and she was so so old already and ...

and then she had me.

and god did i ever turn out didnt i. nutcase. freak. sociopath.

Major axis: morbid Obsessive-compusive
Minor axis: depression

medicated. isolated. 'treated'

No records of that. Those I shredded.

But I can't shred the mark on my soul. I can't shred how I see how people look at me, knowing they see a freak.

But I can shred something that's shreddable.

Guess what I found at the bus stop a couple of weeks ago. Guess.

A pack of cigarettes. Just opened. Only one smoked. Lemme get'm out of my backpack here.

Their Newport. Green. I like it. Irish.

I look at them. Sometimes. I feel them when I don't dare look.

One day, I'm gonna smoke one of them.

My last cigarette. Just like my first one. Stolen from somebody's discard.

Why?

'Why?' you ask.

You weren't listening, were you.

My mom, who, by all accounts is a saint, insofar as I can tell ... I mean, I would say she's like Mary, except I made that acquaintance already, thank you, and my mom is someone I'd like to flee to, not from. Well, what did she do?

Nothing. She raised me as best as she possibly could, and one day, to blow off steam, she took a long drag, and look what happened!

Me. That's what happened.

Now. Okay. Use your brains like I do for a sec.

Put me in my mom's place, and have my daughter following along, watching everything I do, and creating her world as she sees it looking at me through her eyes.

Women get postpartum depression, and they wonder why.

Well, no duh, stupid! It's because all the sudden reality hits you with a two-by-four and you realize, after the fact, that you're a mommy.

I have prepartum depression.

Because my mom made one mistake, and it wasn't even a mistake, it was just her letting her hair down with her sister, and I formed my whole reality around that.

Me? With a baby?

You know what I'll do, if I find I'm pregnant (again)?

I'll look for a clinic.

No, not an abortion clinic. I'll look for one of those clinics that kill the mother to save the child. From her.

From me.

But they don't have many of those around, and inquiries along those lines in polite society are usually regarded with more than a modicum of approbation.

So I'll take out that pack of Newports. And take a long drag. My last cigarette. To finish the job the first one did.

If I had any strength in my fingers, I'd take that smoke right now.

But I haven't slept in three days, and I'm dead tired, so I'm going to take a nap, and look at the pack again tomorrow. And not smoke again, tomorrow. And look in the mirror again tomorrow.

You ever look into the eyes of a soulless person? Yes you have. Admit it. Into the eyes who as allows the world to beat the life out of them, entirely, and all they do is what everybody else does, and why, because people are cattle, and they are running on autopilot to sbux to job to home to bed to sbux because that's ...

because that's ... because that's all there is.

You ever look into those eyes?

Probably not. You've got to be looking out of eyes to look into somebody else's eyes. And you can't look at anything, can you, because that require too much ... from you. Too much being what again? Exactly.

Well, I look into the depths of soulless eyes every. fucking. day. Every single morning.

And then, I go out, and I look into your eyes. And I try. Oh, God, I try to see you, to see someone there, but I'm not very good looker and im so so tired of looking out, hoping, hoping, and getting nothing back but just people resigned, resigned to just pushing on, pushing through, pushing past me and everything else in their life 'bothering' them.

I'm going back to reading the Eddas.

bye now.

Sensitive Girl

Do you know the difference between a sensible girl and a sensitive girl? Although it's not necessary that these two girls be different persons.

Hypothetically speaking.

So, it's not that I have reason to complain. I'm alive. That's a plus, I guess.

So, remember when I got just deluged by rain? I mean, the most recent time. Well only a crazy girl would let that happen to her again, on the same week, forsooth!

So, I packed. Clothes, that is. In my sbux backpack.

I'm quite the sbux girl. Like, can I even stay away from one for just one day? Ever? Even after I quit?

But I digress ... and do you know how much those little Naked Fruit juice thingies cost? Every day? Sure, mango madness helps me breathe, but ... maybe breathing is too expensive, for goodness sake.

Did I mention to myself that I digressed?

So I went to the zoo earlier this week. Saw the blesbok (imagine my lips caressing that word as I say it over and over and over again) and the macaw, that would not say 'Hello' to me, no matter how many times I kept saying 'Hello' encouragingly to it. Do you know how many times I kept saying 'hello' to that bird? I don't know, either. It was a lot.

And the zoo? There's a lot of walking to it. It's very hilly. And I was just walking along, la-di-dah, and what happens? Out of nowhere the storm clouds come rolling in, and FWHOOSH! it was the deluge. Everybody ran for cover, mommies pushing their babies, chaperones herding the school children, so you know, a smart girl would head under a canopy, right?

Well, the thing is, for me, is that I'm wind and water. And, God! I just threw my head back and spread out my arms and just ... just took it all into my being.

I was eyed by more than one person. I remember one India woman, her almond skin and eyes, now wide with disbelief, just staring at me, so I smiled, God! I smiled at the pure joy of it, being caught in a rain storm and just living!

Of course, my sbux backpack was safely ensconced under the canopy, so I could just, you know, change out of my wet things (drenched, actually), and everything would be fine.

Never mind that I've been coughing for about a month now.

And I didn't take into my calculations that walking back up all those hilly hills to the sbux just outside the zoo (how convenient!) would take a while, like 'more than a half-hour' a while.

And I didn't forecast that the temperature would drop 25°F right after the storm, instantly.

And so the bedraggled field mouse of a girl reached the sbux, and hit the air conditioning in there ... I might've sneezed once or twice.

But I changed in the little girl's room, and so everything would be fine. I'd just metro home. That is: ride the metro rail to D.L. and then take the quatro-cero-dos to my stop and walk the rest of the way home.

Of course, the temperature refused to rise. At all. And then it got late. And the walk home ...

Of course, the rain storm was gone, but then there was this light, then heavy mist that stuck to me, my hair, my clothes, ... my throat.

And I got home, and I plopped down onto bed, and I started coughing.

So here I am. My head is something the size of Luxembourg and I keep coughing and nothing comes up or out, except when it does and it's phlegmatic and a bit greenish. That's not good, is it?

But that's not such a big deal. Not really. What's the big deal is that when I cough, I want my head to come off, because that's what it feels like it's doing. Or what I wish it would do. I have a headache that ... just my head hurts, and is hot.

I guess I'll go to the doctor's Monday. I hate going to the Doctors. I hate the whole medical ... industry. I never felt good going to them as a girl, and then when ... well, steamroller? I've been flattened by them.

Anyway. Went to confession today. Walked. How? you ask. I am so doped up on ibuprofen that I am floating in a sea of pain, that I don't feel at all, because I don't feel a single part of my body.

And I'm a very kinesthetic person. I'm very connected to the feeling of being inside my body, so when I get disconnected from my body, when I go outside myself, which I have done, it's the most bone-chillingly terrifying thing for me. I'm disconnected from my body now, and I feel ... I feel I might not make my way back to myself. But I am detached ... from my body, so I'm feeling emotionally numb, too.

"People do not die of trifling colds!" snaps an irritated Mrs. Bennett to her teasing husband, seriously concerned that Jane might not make it.

Jane made it. But that's because little Lizzy, her sweet, smart, sharp sister was there with her.

I've been hovering in and out of consciousness at home. I ate some ramen noodles ... yesterday? ... morning? and then went back to bed and then I went to confession.

Which was ...

Okay, I didn't go to Fr. P, 'cause the line was long there.

Yeah, right. It was longer there. But if I go to Fr. T, a little Vietnamese man who survived communist interrogation...

They told him to renounce his belief in Jesus, and when he wouldn't, they bashed out his teeth with the butt of a rifle.

... Well, he's old, and hard of hearing, and he hasn't heard my confession in about a year.

Didn't stop him from laying into me. Hard. For the admonishment and absolution. God! I go to confession knowing what a bad, terrible person I am, I confess it, and then I get what-for.

"Masturbating twenty times since the last confession?" he reproached. "That's too much. That's a sickness. You have to get to the root of this evil, or you will be addicted and consumed by it until you die."

Thanks, Father. He absolved me, and then I had to walk home with that. With this. With me. I made it home. I always have lived within a block or two of a church, so I could walk to daily Mass before going to school. And have a vision of Mary. Bonus.

No visions today, 'cause maybe I'm too tired now. I'm going back to bed. So tell me what I'm a shit I am for not telling you how I'm doing, ... after all, I'm barely typing and typing and typing these words in the hands I don't feel connected to these arms I don't know what they are attached to. I can take it. I'm thick-skinned, colored yellow with a dusting of pollen.

And you know what? With all this, I have absolutely no reason to bitch. My sister doesn't have cancer. I didn't get a kidney infection. I didn't lose my husband in Afghanistan. My boss isn't bending me over his desk and fucking me up the ass so he doesn't have to divorce his wife and pay paternity on a child he fathered in me. I'm not in a dead-end job, like the millions of people I see rushing onto and off of the metro every day, pushing me around as if they don't see me, as if I'm not there, so focused they are to get to their jobs ('Susan, correct these reports for me, will you?') and then so focused to get the hell home, so they can fight with their husband and scream at their kids and have a headache and wake up early and do it over again.

I'm none of those things.

So I should be happy. Yay! Yippee!

Good night.