A menthol-laced cigarette late at night with my two brothers.
A clear, refreshing summer night, I envision myself shivering with a shaved head, because I wanted to know what having no hair felt like (My scalp felt like sandpaper to my fingers and I was constantly cold, so never again). A black, blank sky caught by streetlight halos, the glow of the mind-numbing pyrotechnic box flickering just inside the front door seeming welcoming and homey as long as we remained outside and beyond it's enslaving influence. Just to know, I borrow my older sibling's pinch of chemical soaked-leaves tipped with compacted wall-insulation packaged in a flimsy paper-cylinder and suck cautiously. I understand instantly. The clarity of crystalline death trickles into my throat and lungs like a window-pane blossoming with frost. The simplicity of the object in my hands was a lie, an illusion that hid the dragon locked within it's paper cage. Loose it and it sears. I cough unrestrainably for a few seconds.
It flickers and smolders contentedly as I pass it on to my younger sibling.
Now I content myself with letting others kill me with their own choice of machochism and refrain myself. Perhaps first and last.
UNREAD