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cheeto puffs and cigarettes by victoria rose
Her hands smelled of cheeto puffs and cigarettes. It was a strange, repugnant combination – one of self-destruction, of sabotage. She was out to commit a crime. She was out to be an adulterer…to herself. It was her first cigarette, her first pack. She held the limp “cancer stick” up to her lips, pretending that she was Greta Garbo. She stared at her pale reflection in the car mirror as she puffed and blew the smoke out through her chapped lips. She wanted to pollute her lungs, pollute herself. But she also wanted to be romantic.
Why did she want to hurt herself, you ask? She didn’t really know. This was new to her, this form of self-mutilation, this desecration. Up to this point, punishment came in the form of casual “sexcapades” – ones that made the emptiness deeper and more tangible. She would get lonely, search through her cell phone address book, pick a number at random, invite herself over, fool around while fantasizing about the man of her dreams, and leave feeling less fulfilled and less desirable than before. Now she wanted something harsher.
An innocent, she wanted to corrupt herself with things she’d scoffed for years. She was the kind of girl that thought drinking was a conformist act, didn’t understand smoking because "it is clearly carcinogenic," and refused recreational drugs because she was hyper-sensitive– she didn’t need a chemical alteration to feel creative and found it less legitimate, and almost a form of cheating when other people did. Now, here she was, driving aimlessly around Los Angeles, at 3:30 AM, because she had nowhere to go, nowhere to turn, with a pack of cigarettes in hand, looking for a drinking buddy, and fantasizing about doing something big. She was actively searching for the big, bad, wolf instead of meandering along to her grandmother’s cottage unaware of the darkness existing within the forest.
Her home was hell, so she couldn’t go there. In fact, she felt she had no home at all. Every enclosed space bred claustrophobia, and every outdoor one made her feel small. At a loss, she parked on a random neighborhood street. She had intended to go to the beach, but realized midway through the drive that parking would be a hassle, and strange men might lurk in the shadows. While she was feeling destructive and dangerous, she didn’t have an immediate death wish.
She stood outside, leaned up against her car door, stared up at the darkened night sky and the few and far between dull, twinkling stars, and puffed on her cigarette. It wasn’t lit. She used the cheap red lighter she had bought at the Shell gas station, along with the Parliaments, and the cheeto puffs, and a pack of gum, and where she exchanged her self-worth as currency, and watched the flames burn down the paper. It looked strikingly beautiful.
She put the cigarette up to her lips, inhaled, exhaled, and felt a bit calmer. Hurting herself made her feel better. Even though it wasn’t physical pain, it was “bad,” conceptually, and for some reason that made her feel peaceful. She was so accustomed to being good. And what good had it done her?
She opened the bag of cheeto puffs, and crunched down on one, the cheese collecting in between the indentations of her molars. When did life get this convoluted? She wondered, almost aloud. It’s always been difficult, but when did it get to the point when others hurting her wasn’t enough, that now she had to resort to self-sabotage? She threw the cigarette onto the slicked pavement, channeling the femme fatales in the forties, stepped on it with the tip of her sandal, and sighed. She got back into her car and decided it was time to get wasted. No more aimless driving, no more aimless thoughts. Decisiveness. This girl will self-destruct in…3…2…1…
Blast off.
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