Soles and Poison

I don't know which one it is tonight. The drinking or the smoking or the other thing I won't name because naming it makes it real and I'm not in the business of reality right now. What I know is that the road feels longer than it is and my shoes keep dragging like they're grieving something, sole kissing the ground a half-second too late, catching on cigarette butts flattened into the dirt of the mountain road and I think — briefly, brilliantly — that's the most honest thing on this road right now. A dead cigarette. Still leaving a mark. Still making someone's shoe pause.

I should write that down. I won't. It'll live in the fog and die there and that's fine. Not everything deserves to survive the night.

People think substance is the problem. As if the bottle is the villain in this little comedy. As if the smoke curling out my mouth is the antagonist and not just a prop in a play that was already written badly. They don't understand — and I say this with the patience of someone who no longer has patience — they don't understand that substances are just the most honest architecture a person can build around themselves. You drink, you say I am drinking. You smoke, the smoke says it before you do. There's no pretense. No mortgage on a feeling you can't afford. No performance review on your grief.

But Karen — I don't know a Karen, but stay with me — Karen is in a relationship that smells like a gas leak and she's in there lighting candles and calling it romance and nobody makes a face at Karen. Nobody grimaces when Karen says we're doing really well actually, her voice doing that thing where it climbs at the end like a question that knows the answer.

I drag my shoe across another flattened butt.

There you are, I think. You understood something.

The thing about poison is that we all choose one. This is the part where I'm supposed to sound wise and I do sound wise, I think, the way things sound wise when you're not entirely sure which direction is north. But I mean it. Every single person I've ever loved has had something they put in their body or their calendar or their prayer or their phone screen at 2am — something that said this is how I survive the specific texture of my particular sadness. Some people choose wine. Some people choose work. Some people choose someone who is wrong for them with the dedication of a scientist, returning again and again to the same experiment expecting different results, calling it love, calling it complicated, calling it we have history.

I call mine by its name. That's the only difference.

And still I get the face.

You know the face. The slight tightening around the mouth. The eyes that go oh. The careful performance of concern that is really just discomfort wearing a costume. I've started making a catalogue of the people who give me the face and cross-referencing it with the things they won't admit about themselves and let me tell you, the data is extraordinary. The man who wrinkled his nose at my cigarette outside the office is three months into convincing himself his boss respects him. The woman who said do you really need another is two years into a relationship she stays in because the alternative is explaining herself.

I don't say any of this out loud. I just drag my shoe.

Scrape. Catch. Release.

Maybe it's the mountain air. Maybe it's the other thing I won't name. But I'm thinking about the people I've smoked with — the real ones, the good conversations, the ones where someone said something true at 3am and we all went quiet in the way that means yes, that's it, that's the whole thing. The cigarette passing like a sentence. Like punctuation. Like we were writing something together that neither of us would remember correctly but both of us would feel for years.

That's what they don't put on the packaging. May cause genuine human connection in poorly lit places. May result in the only honest conversation you've had all month.

Side effects include: someone finally saying the thing.

I slip a little on the road. Not dramatically. Just enough to make my heart do that small, sudden thing. And I laugh — alone, on a mountain road, slightly drunk or high or both or neither, laughing at my own shoes — and it's the most tender I've felt all week.

That's the part no one talks about. That even in the middle of it, even scraped across the ground of something you can't fully name, there are these small ridiculous moments where being alive feels almost — almost — like it was the right call.

My shoe catches another butt. Drags it a few inches. Lets it go.

I keep walking.

The road doesn't get shorter. But I stop needing it to.

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