Blazing

It was rainy and humid the first day of summer vacation, and after too much cake and caffeine at my boyfriend's graduation party, I was more than ready to go chill with whoever and do whatever. The euphoria of the day helped the Excedrin drive back the migraine I had woken up with, and I was simply happy.

We drove to the house to the sound of KoRn blasting through custom car speakers with inadequate bass, and rain spattering across the windshield. We were laughing as we came down the steps and into your friend's back yard. Laughter drifted up from all of you to meet us, and I couldn't help but smile.

Halfway down the steps, I stopped, my laughter cut off like a French revolutionary under the guillotine. I could see it before you looked at me, or spoke, or even moved. It clung to you like the equivalent of a visual odor, if there was ever such a thing. It was like heat waves flowing from you, but only I could see them, and the heat of whatever created them only smacked me in the face. The shock traveled over me like a rush of hot oven air. Then you turned to me and smiled, but your smile was all wrong. I tried to recover, to pick up the rhythm I had lost under the blaze, so I said, “Hey you, how are you?”

And you said, “I'm fucking blazed. How are you?” And your eyes were unfocused, and your aura was a dusty, dull gray, and your smile was skeezy and much to close to some out-of-place sly sort of grin. And I thought, How fitting a word for all of this, because you are burning, my friend, you are burning away like a paper on fire, like that cigarette you're lighting, like a broken candle lit from the middle and then at both of its ends.

So I told you, “I'm sober, thanks for asking,” because that was all I could think of to say, and I dragged a half-assed smile onto my face, and the smoke from your cigarette joined theirs, and the humid air sat down on my shoulders, and the panic rubbed up against me like a cat begging to be stroked. My head pounded much to sharply, then, and the world seemed much to bright, and I could feel myself shaking as the air fled my lungs. I shoved at it all like it was an annoying kind of pet wanting too much attention. But it didn't leave, and the pain in my head tasted sour and sick, and your laugh was all twisted in the wrong direction.

I tried to step away, to coax it all to stop, but it wouldn't, or it couldn't, so I sat back down, and five minutes later, I was almost shouting, begging him to take me home, because the split second of your eyes locked with mine was too damn much of this very wrong thing. All of them (and you) went quiet then, and my headache made it hard to think, so I can't remember if it was surprise or guilt or fear throbbing in that silence, only that it was thick enough to dig into, like my nails leaving half-moon imprints in the flesh of my shaking arms.

I spent the ride home with my head in my boyfriend's lap, trying to think through the acid pain of what in the world had hit me so strongly that all of my defenses had fallen. An hour later, crying on the phone to the only person I could talk to, I stumbled upon it.

It wasn't that you were baked, my friend. It was that, because you were so far gone, you didn't have the sense not to say that so bluntly to my face. If you were sober, you would have known better. You never would have cut me with the knife you knew you had in your hand. You know me better than that. You care for me more than that. You struck out and hurt me because you weren't thinking straight.

But I guess that's why you were high in the first place, wasn't it?

So you didn't have to think.