Skip to main content

Scout on Addiction/Smarties

 Candy wrappers slathered onto wooden tables and chip bags’ potent smells wafted through the air and around the stickiness of all the junk food you could ever imagine. No child knew it then, but those chemicals kept them high. Maybe it was on sugar, possibly on one of the countless chemicals under the nutritional information listings with names none of us could read. Either way, it lifted those of us who couldn’t rely on anything else, who kept that smile plastered on our faces from eight to three. A quarter of an hour after that injection, that wrinkling of the wrappers, the crushing of the Smarties, we were free from everything.

            We only needed it more the older we got, but eventually, it wasn’t strong enough; we needed something new, something stronger. A few sniffs couldn’t hurt, right? Just like those powdered Smarties, except much more expensive. I almost couldn’t feel myself after it, and all I could remember during it was those Smarties from all the years before. My mother would always tell me to eat them, that sniffing would only bother my lungs and I was too young to pretend to do such a thing. I don’t think I understood her then, but it was obvious now; that I was what she didn’t want me to become. It was almost like she had sensed that I was already gone, that the lifestyle she and others forced upon me from childhood was beginning to start a chain of events, sporadic and uncontrollable. I was sure she had seen the powder on my nose one of those nights, but she was already too gone and empty to care. But I was feeling again, I was remembering.

            I need something stronger, and just a little easier to buy. A few ticket shots here and there between shifts couldn’t damage me, right? They were just like the candies wrapped in that colorful plastic, always sticking to the desks and the ground. But these only stuck to my tongue, almost dripping down my nose, into my brain, and through the windows of my soul. If I wasn’t working to pay off another candy, I was taking one and getting lost in the memory of wrappers just like the ones I used. The ones my mother littered across the house when she wandered off into the night. The ones my father would yell at her for taking as the crinkled sound of his footsteps trudging over them seeped into my dreams at night.

            Stronger! I need something even stronger than those shots. A few pills throughout the day could get me through, right? They were just like those Smarties before I crushed them, at the time before I rid myself of the innocence I once had. I swallowed them and they left a trail of bliss across my tongue, down my spine, and through my veins. It was strong, yes, but it was never like before when I was truly engulfed in trying to remember something that I could never grasp, always living freely in a mind uninhabited, only a dark abyss to embrace.

            I was buying a bottle of wine when I saw it again. Those faded colorful candies were organized in one row with that wrapper that always followed me through my worst nightmares. I bought two packs, just for nostalgia. Maybe it was the wine that got to me, but I took them out, just for a sniff. And those smells of childhood returned, and I couldn’t stop my hands from twisting the wrapper and crushing them until they were only a fine powder. I opened it again, spilling powder, and there I was, leaning over, letting the Smarties climb up my nose. They clouded my lungs, meeting all the drugs I had taken after those elementary school parties, seeing the spiral I had slipped down on after that first sniff all those years ago.     

That peak was finally back.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Scout on Cycles/Without Fail

      And so I return, back to the black and white letters and the soft clacking of the keyboard. I return after the rejection of my fragility, knowing now that the escape is temporary. How can I find meaning in this obscure trouble? How can I continue to be angry at the fleeting wind? When all is said in done, I sit in crowded rooms alone and listen to phones ring without an answer. I look around only to count how many people have run from me, mistreated me, and spit on my name. Shallow walls swallow me in whenever I walk, cloudy air consumes my sentences whenever I speak. That pit in my stomach doesn’t leave because it is my soul; broken, abused, self-pitying, and pathetic, but still my soul. It and I long for the day that it will be free to find its purpose. Today, I watched the breeze shuffle through the leaves, and I remembered the days when I would stare up at it and wonder if it was all the same. Every road had trees almost exactly alike, which I learned from...
1 comment
Read more

Scout on Siblings/ Mazes in the Chinese Church

The mind chooses the worst times to be vacant. On the day I left, not a single thought came to my mind. I looked, I ate, I walked, but I can hardly remember thinking anything at all. It was never like that before, when me and my brother ran through mazes alone, finding each other and nothing else for years on end. I don’t think I thought anything then either, but I wish I did so that I could remember those times. The places and people that became so far away now engulf my mind when they have become so out of reach. I can still feel those memories, in a distant corner of my heart that gets warm when anything vaguely familiar is nearby. Sometimes in my dreams, I run through the mazes looking for the old him, for the old me, for something that feels right. Now I feel mature and intelligent, but I felt those things then too, even if I wasn’t. I feel wrong and right, but I simply want to feel that time. When I lingered at boards with art, writing, festivals, and any semblance of life that...
Post a Comment
Read more

Scout on You/ Focus

Focus. Carry yourself through the movements and the rhythms, the light and the dark, the sun and the moon shining on you as you stare into the sky every night and every day, not for answers but for distractions. Carry me away, you tell the stars. Carry me away because I can’t focus. Get used to the silence, to the droning of the wind like the sky, telling the world to remember you when you can’t remember the person you were just last week. Focus on the voices that enter the beats of the wind and stars as they sing to you. As they tell you to focus. Chase the pavements, chase the promises they tell you as you skin your knees. Someone was just around the corner, you tell yourself. Someone who could tell you to focus, someone who couldn’t sync themselves with the sun, the stars, and the wind. You remember them, but will you remember you? Your rhythms are defined by their shadow, incapable of finding their definition without the sounds of others. In this atmosphere, you pour yourself. You ...
Post a Comment
Read more