“he smells like weed” (19:16 | 3.9.22)

Intoxication is a dangerous thing. 

When you carved out your heart and made it a petite, exquisite, fragile table piece, it didn’t stop the blood. Let alone pressing your palms and wrapping bandages around it. 

Once in a while, you gaze at it, of course. You know, when you are eating, chatting, nonchalantly flirting. Yet at that moment, you couldn’t care less about the darkened shade of your decorative heart and you don’t even remember the quantity of the layers of bandages that you stitched on your own chest. But you didn’t care. Even when hundreds of flashback warnings fling through your mind, even when thousands of despicable glances were shot to make you feel momentarily guilty. But you turned around and stared at your table piece, just like you did before. As if resting there and baking your brain to feel that intoxication could solve world hunger or cure cancer. 

Sure you would blame it on the person who coerced you to do all of this. Blackmail, even. Yet the hole is on your chest. Yours, and yours alone. Maybe some day you would smash that table piece in half. Tattered pieces of stained glass scattered scarcely between the creak of the squeaky floor. Or, you would unwrap the bandages and put it back in. With a broom gently sweeping across the dusty surface, tidying it all up. Or maybe both. Taping up the broken pieces one by one and manipulating yourself into thinking that it was complete. It was always complete.  

But that wouldn’t suffice. The mere act of amendment does not equal grace or forgiveness, but rather, addictions. The tighter that grasp is on your neck, the less oxygen you would inhale…until your throat is full of sticky, metallic liquid that progressively tinted the tip of your tongue. You are coughing. You are coughing blood. 

Irredentism, the 19th century version of wanting back things that you had. Mesmerized by the power of intoxication, that feather-light feeling you once had. It wasn’t perfect, but it would suffice. You wouldn’t let it go, yet you attempted to break the cycle as if the incident itself was not already hanging by a thread since the first day. But you failed. Miserably. So you stared at yourself in the mirror and wondered. That exact spot where velocity and pressure are just a bit necessary. That exact spot where you soaked your senses to be euphoric, to be intoxicated, to be…happy.  

Bliss is a wonderful thing. It truly is. Yet like the frog in the boiling water, happiness is pure h2o. The term is broad. A little too broad. The process itself is like purchasing an estate of your own. Easy, personal property forever. You know you would abandon it eventually. Just not too soon, not too quick, and not too sudden.