Lighter

Sometimes, I smoke pot because it's fun.  I'm not talking about being high--I'm talking about the actual, literal, smoking of pot.  I love everything about pot.  I love the way it smells, the way it tastes, the way it looks when I singe my fingers and wipe them on my thighs.  I love the way a new lighter sounds, that first spark of warmth against my eyebrows.  I love that first breath, thickness funneling into my chest until I can barely hold the heat, then feeling the ricochet of blood through my temples as I exhale.  I love my tongue, dry, the parched cavern of my mouth like cotton and cracked sand.  I love the way my eyes burn.  I love my pipe, love my gorgeous bong, tigers and snakes and Amazon breasts sandblasted into the side.  I love wiping trichomes from the inside of the Ziploc with my finger.  I love everything about the process of smoking pot.

Sometimes, I smoke pot because it's FUN.  And here, I AM talking about the high--dizzy, swirling, lightheaded, insatiable, every single second of the high.  I love sprawling on the couch, my limbs nitrous-weightless off the edge, against the floor.  I love talking to myself while I make Pop-Tarts.  I love standing up and feeling blackness creep into the corners of my eyes.  I love hearing my heartbeat in my ears, tipping my head back and dropping,

dropping,

faster and falling and spiraling into the carpet, a rollercoaster of my own design.  I love the way food tastes, the way the breeze smells, the way light filters in through the trees on the other side of our sliding glass door.  I love everything about being high.

And sometimes, I smoke pot because I don't want to feel anything.  Because the panic and the tension and the shame are overwhelming.  Because if I think about the work I've put off for the past three weeks, I'm afraid my heart will stop.  Because I don't belong here, and I know it, and everyone else knows it even better than I, and if I stop to think about it too hard, or for too long, my coach will turn back into a pumpkin, and the mice will scurry away into the shadows at my feet. 

Sometimes I smoke pot because it's easier than not smoking pot.

Sometimes I smoke pot because, when I close my eyes, I can't feel my breasts any more.

Sometimes I smoke pot and fantasize that my name is Tony.  I smoke and imagine myself with a mustache, a beard, a cock, a flat chest, bigger hands.  I listen to taped recordings of myself at fifteen, at eighteen, at twenty-two, and I realize that years of smoking pot have gradually--almost imperceptibly at first, but more and more prominently with the passage of time--lowered my voice, deepened it, dropped my childhood soprano to a raspy contralto (at best), which just makes me want to smoke more.  Sometimes I smoke and honestly believe that my clit is a penis.  Sometimes I smoke and fuck, unleashed, hungry, devastatingly free, and laugh out loud because the shame and discomfort have finally evaporated.  Sometimes I smoke and get anxious, agitated--sometimes, I see and feel and know too much of myself and have to smoke even more to forget myself again.

Sometimes, pot saves me. 

Sometimes, I think that I need pot just to be able to live with myself.

Sometimes, I realize that without pot, I wouldn't know myself in the first place.