Reverie- Mist

Tap, tap, tap.

 

Mist’s eyes fluttered open. It was bright out, and beams of hot, yellow light flooded her bedspread and sent her moaning for the cover of the underside of her sheets. She was almost definitely going to throw up and was in that limbo where it might be better to make a run for the bathroom now, but, on the other hand, movement of any sort might exacerbate her physical condition too much. Her slight movement away from the sun, for example, sent unpleasant convulsions of nausea and muscle contraction throughout her body which made her reflect that the best course of action would be to stay in bed, under her sheets—where they (the sheets) could provide some measure of relief from the assault of light and sun from the outside. 

When the immediacy of escape from the sun subsided, Mist realized (with no emotional response) that it was her birthday.

Tap, tap, tap. What was that sound? She had been certain she had dreamt it, and the confusion brought on by waking had erased the memory of the sound from her mind.

Tap, tap, tap. But it (the sound) was most assuredly real. And what’s more, it was coming from the closet. Mist closed her eyes to the light and repositioned herself so that she was face down on her mattress and the heavily creased top sheet lay over her head, protecting her from the harsh and unwelcome sunlight beating down thereupon. Her eyes closed, she pictured the closet and tried to imagine what might be the cause of the incessant tapping.

Her closet occupied a primary and imposing section of the room, its broad and rectangular face testifying to its utilitarian design. It, in a departure from her pale-colored room, was the deep brown of long since dried blood. For all its size, she didn’t keep much in the way of personal belongings in her closet and had stopped hanging important items of clothing which she wore with regularity in it, since whenever she did, it (the clothing article) was rendered unfindable by her when she needed to locate it (the clothing article) in the future.

Still, the closet wasn’t positively empty. She had a letterman’s jacket that she had bought in Chicago and transported with her. (Inexplicably, in retrospect, since she had worn it neither in Chicago nor now, and she could picture its position; it was hanging, as it was always, at the far end of the metal rod which supported it and several other overcoats and jackets.) It was a rather attractive jacket, all things considered. It boasted what was either an ‘S’ or an ‘F,’ embroidered above the right breast pocket in looping, self-important lettering, adhered to the jacket in the form of a pale orange chenille patch. It (like other letterman’s jackets that she had seen, paraded around by those who presumably earned them themselves) had two rows of uncomfortable ribbed knit cuffs. (Uncomfortable because the seam of the cuffs was itchy and no longer flush with the inside of the jacket.) If Mist were a larger or more long-limbed woman, such seams would be of little bother to her, since they would rub only against an undershirt that she would wear if she ever desired to wear it. (She could picture the exact shirt which would both contrast with and accentuate the stitching of the letterman.) As it was, the cuff scratched against the backside of her hand, and only the tips of her fingers protruded from the ends of the jacket’s sleeves; the rest of the material engulfed her quite completely.

Also plausibly on the metal rod in the closet—though of this she could not be sure, since it could have fallen to the ground or been discarded at some point in time, in which case it was now stuffed somewhere in the overflowing pile of clothing in the white fabric hamper in the closet’s corner—were a pair of “dress jeans,” which (she thought) hung, folded, on a plastic hanger. Its position made it the most prominent feature of the closet, and the fact that she could not recall positively whether the dress jeans were in the closet or not made her think that she had not opened the heavy, dried blood-colored doors thereto in some time, and that maybe doing so would be a good thing. Just as soon as she thought that, though—or began to think that, because she had not committed one way or the other—a pang of intense physiological discord shot through her, and her stomach tightened, and her head beat in tandem with her pulse. She shut her eyes more ferociously and turned her mental attention to the dress jeans until they once again took shape in the space in her head where she could form mental pictures of objects familiar to her. (Does everyone have such a place in their mind? Does everyone picture things abstractedly, as if the object in question were hanging suspended in a photographer’s lightbox with a black background and manipulable, so that it could be seen from all angles simultaneously?) 

The dress jeans: from where had she procured them? They had a distinctly midwestern feel to them, but she didn’t remember having purchased them there. They (the dress jeans) were a baby-blue shade of denim, accented by red threading on the pockets and cuffs. The almost obnoxiously innocent baby blue shade was cut to some extent by the cobalt/cobalt-indigo bands around the waist and above the red stitching which delineated the bottoms of the cuffs.

Tap, tap, tap.

Fucking hell. She had expended several minutes’ worth of aggressively hungover thought on her letterman’s jacket (irrelevant) and dress jeans (doubly irrelevant), both of which were clearly not the causes of the sound which had awoken her. (And which had since persisted, vexing the quiet of her room which was the aspect of her room which she most appreciated and took solace in.)

Enough consideration of those objects which could not tap, tap, tap. But her mind went blank, for there were no immediately recognizable objects that could. Which, she supposed, made sense, since things did not have a tendency to tap, tap, tap of their own accord (and certainly not anything that she, herself, owned). This fact, which she felt correct, worried her, and she opened her eyes bravely against the space between her pillow and mattress, as though she could more effectively problem solve if her eyes were open—independent of whether or not they were fixed on the source of the tapping.

What she should be doing, she decided, was deducing what surface was being acted upon, what surface received the tapping, and coupled with the as-yet-unknown tapping thing, emitted the sound which she, at intervals, could hear. The issue with this plan was that it required her to wait, again, for the sound. 

Guided by the dislogic of her alcohol-soaked brain, Mist decided that the best and most prudent course of action was to wait patiently and consciously cast out any and all thoughts, since they required an internal dialogue to be voiced. (And in their mental articulation, she might miss some crucial sound which could prove to be the determining factor in deducing once and for all the identity of, or some other crucial feature, of the tapper.)

So, she closed her eyes and obstinately thought about nothing. When she felt a thought begin to surface, she truculently shoved it away, to fester (the thought) and rot in some dark and recessed corner of her mind. Such a statement implied a thought’s permanence once formed: that there was no reducing and destructing a thought to its constituent thought-forming elements. The foregoing struck her as true—and a rather intelligent and agreeable thing to think.

She panicked, then, for she had been thinking, and this inspired her to spend ten minutes of immobile thoughtlessness in her bed, her breathing shallow and strands of her hair entering and exiting her lips as she respirated as quietly as she could manage. 

Her room was silent.

A funny thing happens among habitual and chronic marijuana smokers. (And this is me interposing myself, reader; fear not that Mist continued to beat back any semblance of thought when it threatened to denigrate the integrity of her perfect ignorance.) The funny thing that happens sometimes among habitual and chronic marijuana smokers is that life tends to become reduced and simplified into what life really and truly is (on some level, anyway): Which is to say, an elaborated and more colorful system of motivation, performance, and reward, in that order.

For someone who has smoked marijuana daily, life becomes paradoxically both more comfortable and more tedious. The stakes (to the extent that one thinks that there are stakes in life) seem lower, but everything done sober seems like an annoyance, begging (for the chronic smoker, anyway) the question ‘why am I not doing this high?’ Then, once those necessary daily activities are complete, the smoker is duly given his reward, namely smoking. 

The consequences, however, of excessive marijuana consumption are manifold: amotivation, fatigue, social isolation, and mental health issues—the mental health issues perhaps deriving from the amotivation, fatigue, social isolation, and general condition of loving marijuana more than loving life. These consequences are known to the common smoker and known (or guessed at) by those who presume (often without justification or without any right of such presumption) to know what it is to smoke as much as a chronic smoker does. What is equally known to him who smokes (but not to the latter, judgmental section of the population who judges him without knowing him) is the feeling of muddled clarity that smoking sometimes but not invariably produces.

The clarity, near as I can both recall and do justice to it, is as follows: sometimes thoughts compete with one another for conscious attention, like little children clamoring around an ice cream truck. But the ice cream man, bombarded with the shrill pitch of children shouting and requesting various ice cream flavors or cones or what have you, finds he is simply unable to make sense of the requests made of him, and the yells become untenable for him, until he is simply unable to conduct his business at all. Hundreds of children (unsupervised, for the purposes of this contrived hypothetical) flock to him, and he becomes overwhelmed by the volume and violence of his clientele until he breaks and becomes non-functional.

Not so with marijuana: for smoking is a great distillant; the perfect streamliner, as it were. It firmly but beneficently exerts its will upon this mass of children, until they resolve themselves into a gentle line, and (what’s this!) many of them seem to have disappeared. Those children that remain make sensible, coherent, and eminently addressable requests of the ice cream man, which are serviced—albeit slower, since the ice cream man is now high, after all—in due course. This, if any, was the idea that Mist was considering: maybe her thoughts as regards the unknown and execrable tap, tap, tapping would be greatly improved if she smoked.

She opened her eyes again, and maybe it was her imagination or maybe the sun had genuinely repositioned itself in the sky, but the light was gentler when it met her this time. She blinked and scratched at the grain-of-sand-sized pieces of yellow crust in the inner part of her eyeball. Then, she rolled away from her window and toward a little square wooden trunk in which she kept various keepsakes. She kept the little square wooden trunk next to two boxes of roughly the same size and feel, so she had a difficult time distinguishing between them when she reached her hand down from her bed and felt around blindly for it. 

What she was seeking was not the trunk itself, but a baggie of pre-rolled marijuana cigarettes kept therein, and she felt a frisson of excitement run up her arm as she undid the clasp to the trunk (once it was determined that it was the trunk, and not the two similar-feeling receptacles kept nearby) and held the cool plastic of the baggie between her thumb, middle, and forefingers.

Her hand shaking, she felt for a blue Bic lighter which was imposing itself weightlessly on top of her covers and placed one joint (the longest but most slender of the bunch) in her mouth, clutching its narrow base between her quivering lips. She lit it and rolled onto her pillow so that the back of her head and neck were resting and she was staring up at her ceiling as the joint burned away, an advancing line of red and black as an increasing amount of the marijuana incinerated itself and filled her lungs.

Almost right away, a feeling of clear-headedness filled her, in relation to the degree of smoke filling her lungs. The sound, she now realized—the tap, tap, tapping—had been faint, and it came not from a high place, but from a position low in her closet. Its originating location served as a source of comfort for her. After all, what was there to fear that was so low to the ground? 

She lay with her arms folded against her naked chest, her right thumb idly brushing against the underside of her left exposed nipple in a way that felt nice. Her nausea was forgotten but a shrunken vestige of her headache remained. She inhaled and exhaled nothing but acrid-tasting smoke for the span of several minutes, until the thin tower of paper evaporated into nothing, and the coffee-colored filter at the base of her joint was the only thing above her mouth. A fine, dark powder of ash had accumulated around her mouth and in the space between the top of her lip and the underside of her nose. 

Now, she felt equipped (and felt it necessary) to act. She discarded her joint and made a face like a sneer, shaking her head violently and suddenly so as to remove the ash which had accumulated on her face. It fell like dark snow delicately and soundlessly around her, tracing her as if in relief.

Then, she sat up in bed and timidly walked across her bedroom. The bottoms of her feet were damp from perspiration, and she made a thwap, thwap, thwapping noise as she crossed the wooden floor. Violently, and staggering backward to avoid any threat (if one were to present itself to her upon her opening of her closet door), she stared into her closet, studying the outlines of shoe boxes and unknown articles of clothing and the dark and misshapen form of her jacket and her jeans which rested over her bra (from underneath which a light, cream-colored strap extended). She had been privy to this exact, or an otherwise similar, view before; her closet was as it always was.

It (the sound) was nothing. She must have imagined it. 

Yes, she must have imagined it.

Her head hurt again. She turned and emitted a soft and modulated moan as she crawled back to bed and closed her eyes against the now waning sunlight.