smoke and night

I love the way smoke looks. I can't smoke because I have asthma and one hit would kill me fucking dead, but I like watching it. I love how it looks alive, the way it curls around objects and unfurls into the sky. I love the way the light hits it and it turns the air murky and mysterious. I love the way it looks when people lean against a wall and have a cigarette or a joint in their fingers and they inhale and close their eyes and let the smoke pour like liquid out of their nose and mouth and curl around their fingers. And I love the way it looks on a ceiling, when the combined trails from a hundred mouths form murky clouds overhead and fill a room with the stench of tobacco and pot, I love the way it lingers on clothes and skin, musky and spicy and sharp and sweet.

So it's summer, and it is way too hot and too bright to do anything. I keep on trying to explain that I am a teenager, a creature of the night, and that I am pale and nonathletic and that they should know what a delicate fucking butterfly my immune system is, but they refuse to listen and continue to make loud noises at eight in the morning (which is too early for anything, I mean, jesus wept) despite my insomnia. My mother says that I should just take a melatonin if I'm having trouble sleeping, but the truth is, I like having insomnia. I like being awake at four in the morning when everybody else is asleep and sneaking out to the porch and looking at the stars. It's weird, but I like being tired, too. I like that state of sleep deprivation where everything is sharp and real and alive. I don't have to worry about the reality of what I see because I don't have to be crazy if I see things that aren't there. I can just blame it on a lack of sleep. Sometimes during the day, I start to miss the night and then I feel guilty because the day is beautiful in its own right, but it doesn't have the security of the dark. I have never been afraid of the dark. The sun burns and kills and heats, but the dark is safe and cool and it surrounds you like a hug. The dark will never hurt you. The night comforts you when you cry and hides you when you can't bear to be around anybody. the light will come and go, but shadows are always left behind to help you.