(Written in 1990)
By Linda Larson
When I smoke cocaine a light goes on in my bloodstream, in my innermost region, a light goes on. It is the brilliant cold morning light of winter, chilling me like a teardrop of glass. The Snow Queen splinters one's eyes with shards of ice, turning everything cold and snowlit with exhilaration. Then the talking begins, the quick disjointed confidences of swift, disjointed lives meeting headlong and head on in the clouds of smoke and the passing of the pipe.
Suddenly, light is everywhere. In a black cup of coffee we meet as at a railway station in a blizzard after a long parting.
You are wearing a different coat than I remember, there are more lines around your eyes and you grow thinner with each hit of the pipe, but it is that beloved face; those familiar arms, the caring, strong hands and your black and blue smile, your eyes of midnight, that prizefighter gaze for an instant that tells me you are my champion, my oldest, wisest friend, my father, brother and more than that, my lover husband that is lost with me in a cloud of smoke that flames out in an instant, leaving us remote.
The smoke disappears and we are at the railway station in the darkness of early morning, our train unmet, alone and cast off in ragged clothes with ragged eyes...the light has gone out and we are strangers camping with only an empty pipe for warmth. And everything has been spent of and on the moment. We are bankrupt with nothing to share and nothing of our own but the hunger and ache for the light. Our horses have been left untied and have run away and we are barefoot in the snow with no footprints to lead us home. We climb into the big bed and nest in each other's arms without any light or warmth left in our hearts...only the dark refuge of each other. That in our crimes we have spent even ourselves and our love on this momentary spark that goes out when the money runs out. The candle glow of our human hearts is snuffed out by the lightning flash of the drug, and the smoke that billows around our heads carries with it in its passing our dreams and hopes and gratitude for this life. And with only the aching we retire, more than bankrupt, less than murdered, we lie in a risk gone bad.
Food gives no nourishment, beauty has lost its dazzle, flesh and blood becomes an irritation...our only yearning is to disappear like the smoke in a memory of what peace is, in a memory of that sunlight blaring in the bloodstream, that whisper and cry for more.
What is left in the embrace, that behind the smoke billowing in the shadowed room are two hearts that beat as one and that we live. For this, O Christ, I thank you. We have made the journey towards your light once again and returned into the humble, breath of midnight...cold and ghostlike, we have returned from the journey once again and found each other.
Trust is gone and in its place remains a knowledge and a dread that we are doomed to try again to capture light and lose each other in smoke-filled corridors of time. We are junkies. We are chasing death and my greatest fear is that you will get there first, abandoning me to live in the tattered ribbons of daylight without you...that you will catch the light and be gone like the smoke goes, to some place I cannot follow...and there will be no one to hold the match up and shield my eyes as I hold the pipe up to my lips. You will be gone at midnight in a puff of smoke as the years of my life have gone without any song of remembrance, without any monument to your wild sweetness or any map I might follow to your good heart.
Somehow we are living outside of history, outside of consequences, outside of days and nights and weeks and month and years and there is only the calendar of cocaine, tearing off pages until I am alone, until there is no harbor and no home, until there is no way to bear the darkness, until the hunger never goes away again, and the warmth of summer turns cold and my being melts in a hiss of flame and smoke and I am gone to the devil.
I want to stop this while we still have autumn, or the brilliant blue chill of a winter's morning, or the summer night of a winning team and a longing to hit the ball out of the park. Soon it will all be gone, all the ways of renewing ourselves for the journey will be played out and the voices of love will be silenced, and the prayers for our souls will cease, and our crimes will be against nothing and no one. Even the wings of angels will not beat in our breast, and it will be silent and dark forevermore. We will become like the Snow Queen, and none of the children of the world will laugh outside of our windows. Our parting approaches deft and neat as a shot of whiskey. We will flee the snow to save the fire in our hearts and lose each other to memory.
Just a couple of base heads is what we are becoming, and the marriage of light and hope is running black with the blood of our wounded innocent hearts. Like a felled fat-lighter pine we moan: "Don't, Don't, Don't let us end in a cloud of smoke." Let us end as we began, in flight from this and other madness. Carry something of our love into tomorrow, carry something human into the light, leave us something human in our hearts or we will vanish like the Apaches over the Sandia crest, off the cliffs our horses straining power into the air. We are a vanished race of lovers, lost children against the firepower of the smoke we are turning into.* * *
© Linda Larson 2004
