when the only light is the cherry of a cigarette - a confessional

My hands are shaking while I’m thinking of writing this. There is another cigarette lying deep in my lungs. It’s the third in a row I’ve smoked and my tongue burns with it.

It’s the kind of day where I crave human contact and there is no one around on to talk to, no shoulder to cry on, if the tears would ever come. It’s the kind of day where I sit and watch porn alone. (Which isn’t as weird as the time I watched kinky lesbian porn with a friend… a male friend. But that is a whole other story, of which we will never speak.)

I’m empty inside what I suppose is my soul, and my fingers don’t do what they were designed to do. It’s a futile attempt at feeling something, anything, and all I feel is dead inside.

I think about the last three women I was involved with. I don’t wish any of them were here. I don’t need another meaningless fuck in a lifetime of meaningless fucks. Would you believe me if I said I’ve never been touched by a hand that loves me? Sure, my first girlfriend thought she loved me. I thought I loved her too. But she loved everyone else besides me, and open relationships don’t work when your partner brags about her conquests and chucks a tantrum if you ever express any interest in anyone else. I don’t miss her, though sometimes in dark depressed moments I still think about her, and how everything was amazingly intense in the beginning. No one has ever touched me the way she touched me. I learnt to hate her touch. She made my skin crawl, and sometimes she’d slap me around. I was so distant by the end. I just get drunk and cry and tell her how much I hated her and how deeply she’d fucked up my life. I was 19. I didn’t know any better.

I think about how I seem to have an attraction to unhinged women. The kind that smoke weed, get drunk too often, fuck anyone that’s nice to them, are suicidal and emotionally abusive (among other things) and have the potential to be serial killers when they forget to take their meds. So I don’t do relationships anymore.

Instead I let myself get nostalgic for the “crap old days” and watch porn, imaging what it would have been like if I’d ever fucked her the woman that turned into my stalker. I was too far into sobriety by the time she came along, and there is no regret in my decision not to hook up with her. She was the craziest fucker I’ve ever met. But she was interesting, and I’m addicted to interesting people. She made me laugh and I liked feeling special and needed for a while. I know she would have taken me to places that even my darkest fantasies haven’t yet gone. She would have been the kind of woman that I let beat me up in bed, just to heighten the sensations. I wouldn’t have minded her hand around my throat or getting slammed against a wall, because I’m a pain junkie and sometimes I still have a death wish. I would have let her hit me, and I might have hit her back and I know she would have let me. Afterwards I would have crawled out of her bed and made my home. If anyone asked I’d have said I got into a fight. (No one knows the things I think of when I’m alone at night.)

It’s been a long time since I’ve punched anyone. It’s been a long time since I lost myself enough to punch a wall or a door, or anything that hurts. I learnt the power and sick pleasure of restraint and denial. My life has been an exercise in the art of self-inflicted pain, which has always been better than having others inflict pain upon me against my will.

I met a girl once that had been tortured by her father. She was covered in cut marks and cigarette burns, some of them her own and some that had be done to her. She told me that she would cut and burn over the scars, because it gave her a sense of power, as though she could undo the damage done and make it her own. I suppose she’s dead now. She was fifteen then and couldn’t keep herself out of hospital. When I’d met her she’d been in there for trying to gas herself in the kitchen and light herself on fire… the lighter failed.

In moods like this, on days like today when I get the feeling everything is falling apart and getting drunk would be so easy, I think of my past, or rather I fear my past thinks of me, and jumps on the nerve endings in my head, willing me to remember.

I think of the people I left behind and the ones that left me behind. I remember bongs and beds and fainting at the sight of people shooting up. (I never could handle needles.) I remember cheap wine and bruises, and talking my way out of bad situations. I remember being so fucked up I couldn’t control the shit happening to me. I remember watching a girl get raped beneath a house and holding a two-by-four and telling the little fuck to get off her. I remember… too much.

And in the years that I’ve come so far, I look back and think that I can never erase those days where everything was fucked up, and I’d laugh at my own reflection when stoned, because I was so fucking funny to look at. I look back and see the person I’ve become, and I don’t like myself much more now than I did back then, though I know I’m not seeing myself as I really am, which is more than the sum of my past experiences.

I tried to run away from my demons, but there still find me here in the dark.  I write because if I don’t I’ll go mad, I’ll get drunk, I’ll go out and I’ll fuck someone that means nothing to me.

I confess because apparently the act of confessing is good for the soul or some such shit, and maybe I confess to say I was here and this was my life. You can’t see it in my face or in my eyes. You won’t find it in the way I dress or in my tilted smile. You won’t find it in the way I speak. But you’ll find it in my mind and in my writing.

Sometimes I still get the feeling that I need to prove I exist. The joys of a flaring personality disorder in action.

So there is this, for all you lovely people to read.
For a time this was my life.

© Indie Adams 2012