It's nights like these when I wish that I smoked.
Breathe the tainted, tar-filled vapor into my lungs like breathing in a lover's air.
Exhaling a beautiful cloud of putrid gas and watching it blow away in the soft summer wind, into the warm darkness beyond the porch light.
exchanging seven minutes for a breath of sludge that is as bad for you as the rest of the world feels.
Taking it in, and then blowing it out. Knowing part of it will change you and stay inside you.
But letting it.
Feeling relaxed by it.
I wish i could visualize doing that with my job. Take it into my lungs and feel its stress needle my brain and burn my lungs, swallow the customers and their questions in one breath and just... let it go. Take the fleeting nicotine hit of the paycheck and be done with it until the next one leaves the carton.
I wish I could breathe out the pain of my mother, and her mother, and watch it fade in the air, leaving the stale chemical smell of words and actions they don't remember but can never take back. I wish i could go back inside and know the smell will fade, too, by the next time I'm sittin, cross-legged, on the rough blue shared balcony at 4 AM with the roar of all 6 AC units trying to out-drone the crickets.
But I take in the night air, with nothing but a hint of grass and exhaust, sleep and salt from shed tears clawing my puffy eyes. I exhale. A heavy and clear breath, void of the stimulus of nicotine but buzzing with anxiety and feeling tainted all the same for being my air and for not ridding myself of anything more than carbon dioxide.
It's nights like this that I wish I smoked so that my prayers to dead gods had company as they shuffled uncertainly into the sky, squinting at the grayness and wondering if dawn was coming already.
It's nights like these when I wish that I smoked.
enemyoflawns