Smoke
Slowly the smallness of the room began to take shape. He dropped his luggage by his sides, and before the room could grow any smaller, he toppled over face-first into the bed, letting everything about his situation flood back into his mind’s eye.
He was usually able to keep his thoughts at bay during the day, and quite successfully at that. Sometimes he could go a few days straight without having to address them at all, have to stand before their ever-expanding size and scope. Those were his better days, when he could act and feel like the people he saw on the street, or the people he talked to at parties—calmness, presentness were traits that he envied in these people, people who seemed to be so well placed in the universe, people who seemed to be able to think without being caught in it, and act without being frozen by it. On the worse days, he could hardly look at these people without a sense of terrible jealousy. On those days everything was secondary to his thoughts, simply footnotes to a sprawling story that he would tell himself over and over without respite. The words that he fed to himself would make no sense at all—that was the worst part. Sentences ended half way, time had no bearing, and the themes and meanings of things fluctuated wildly. Only occasionally could he pick out something from them useful.
Currently, from among the tangled mass, a few things were clear to him. Namely, he was painfully lonely. He breathed into the pillow, and the smell was new to him, although distinctly feminine. It could have been someone he had known before, had he imagined it so, or quite possibly, someone he had not yet met, having only the smell of a mysterious stranger to long after. It was somehow both at once, however, and the smell suffused his body entirely, bringing to a halt just in time the roaring wave of thoughts of which he was held captive. Loneliness, it seemed to him lately, was the most stable and true feeling he could trust.
He breathed in again the sweet aromatic pillow, held it in his lungs, and exhaled through his nose. He repeated the process a few more times, as if trying to extract every ounce of fragrance from its cool woolen surface. Yes, she must be out there somewhere, if only for the existence of this smell in the universe. There had to be a physical counterpart somewhere, it had to be simply an antecedent to someone real—a flesh and blood person who filled the silhouette drawn in his mind by this smell. If only he could hold onto it just a little bit longer, he thought, he was just beginning to picture her clearly. The more he breathed into this pillow… just a little longer…
Bu the smell lost its newness, and the pillow became warm and odorless. Along with it faded the borders of this imaginary woman and the edges of her body, which had already began to grow color and form, dissipating back into the darkness. From somewhere deep within it returned the rumbling of his intrusive thought, and he opened his eyes quickly, getting up to a sitting position in the bed, not wanting to entertain his unwelcome guests any more than he had to.
Again the smallness of the room became painfully obvious to him, and he couldn’t help but feel trapped. He scanned the room for a place to hang his suit jacket. He was lucky he got it here in once piece, he mumbled something to himself, everyone on the train was so wet and covered in snow, he practically had to guard it the entire ride up here to make sure it wouldn’t get ruined. Hopefully the train leaving tomorrow would be less crowded, he thought, it’s ridiculous he even needed to take two trains to get to his own brother’s wedding. Now he had to take an entire extra day for transit, plus the cost of a motel to stay the night in-between trains. Thankfully his brother had helped him out slightly to pay for the latter, otherwise, he wouldn’t have even bothered to come; he had specified just as much to his brother in his letter two months ago when he first heard of the wedding. He was already preparing himself not to come, as well as his family’s rebukes, when thankfully his brother’s response letter included a fair bit of money for the overnight. The return envelope was marked with a silly monogram composed of the couple’s names, and the sight of the bride’s name, he remembered, made him ill with envy.
He dusted off the suit jacket, made sure all of the buttons were still set in place, and hung it from a coat rack in one of the small room’s corners. He stood in front of it for a brief moment after letting It go, scanning it up and down, and silently chuckling to himself, thinking about how the invite his brother had sent him had clearly specified his requirement to wear a tuxedo, and how most likely he could be the only brother at the wedding not to be clad in black satin. The jacket was a dusty gray color, and had been the only one to fit his lanky tall shape in the store. Still he was proud of it, its dryness, and wondered if there would be any singles at the wedding for him to impress.
The thought was immediately painful, however, as it brought with it the remembrance of his younger brother’s success—as well as his own failure—in marriage before his own. Again, he was confronted with an incoming wave of terrible, uncontrollable thoughts—this, he had recognized a long time ago, was the worst part of his character, most vital flaw in his soul. And yet still felt attached to it somehow, like he would rather contain these thoughts behind a solid wall and occasionally indulge them then remove them from his being altogether. Still, now was not the time to let them break loose. Instead he decided it would be best for him to go for a walk outside and clear his head with a smoke.
He strapped on his snow boots, threw on a heavy felt overcoat, gathered his pipe and tobacco quickly and stepped outside. He was immediately greeted with the freezing winter air, and thought he was lucky for not having decided to take a shower before he left, for as soon as he took his first breath, his nostrils stung with ice, and he could feel the hairs in his nose and on his face cover with frost. He wiped his face with his hand, as if to remind himself that he were real, and started off down the road in front of his little cabin, deciding to walk out of the town’s immediate vicinity until he could see a full sky of stars, or grow tired, whichever came first. Presently there were no stars to see above him but he couldn’t tell whether it was light pollution or just cloudy. He wished silently to himself that it were the former, and started walking in the slow and long-strided manner his legs carried him.
It wasn’t that he had any animosity towards his brother; in fact it was quite the opposite. But jealousy was so entwined with his sense of loneliness that it was hard to separate the two whenever either rose into his mind, and so thoughts of his brother’s wedding were always associated with the pains of his own aloneness, preventing from ever thinking about his brother in a good spirits.
After spending a while considering this unfortunate association in his mind, he closed and re-opened his eyes, and realized that he had been lost in thought again. Refocusing his senses first on the road, then on the gently falling snow collecting on top of it, he silently scolded himself for having succumbed once again to his loftiness.
Someone to talk to would be nice, even if just for a moment, he entertained the image someone walking besides him in the snow. Turning his head to the left almost expecting someone to be there, he found no one, and so he quickly and randomly moved his head in all directions, as if he were simply taking in his surroundings instead of looking for someone. This he did in order to avoid the embarrassment in case anyone happened to be watching from afar, like pretending to brush one’s hair after offering a handshake that goes unnoticed. He did notice however, in his quick appraisal of his surroundings, a line of hare tracks in the snow bank off of the side of the road. Following the path quickly with his gaze, he watched it turn off into the trees, and desperately wished there were a human-sized trail going in the same direction so that he could follow it into the forest. Sadly he returned his attention to the road in front of him, and it seemed to stretch out infinitely into the purple and snowy darkness.
He wasn’t tired yet, however, nor could he see any stars yet, outside from the one or two that assured him it wasn’t clouded over entirely, and so he continued walking, cold, but nowhere near having to turn back on its account. His toes were the only body part he worried about—they were much colder than the rest of his body. Still, he paid no attention to them, thinking only about the hare, imagining it returning to its den, maybe joining another hare or two to keep warm for the night. Where the trail passed into the forest was well behind him now—briefly he considered turning back to go follow it, but then thought better of the matter.
The snow was falling heavier now in big, wet flakes the size of checker pieces or quarters. Farther still from his cabin, he could no longer see any of the sky behind big purple clouds, and he worried a storm moving in would defeat any chance he had of seeing the stars. In spite of this he felt like his continuing to walk, he was deliberately defying something, or proving a point to someone in some mysterious, unknown way. Liking this idea immensely, he widened his strides and defiantly continued down the road.
On the side of him directly opposite the forest was a large lake, which at the moment appeared to be entirely black, darker than either the sky, which was still purple and twirling, or the asphalt in front of him, occasionally visible through thin spots in the snow. Even through the blackness, he could make out the waves on its surface, all of them moving in the same direction. He couldn’t make out the farther shore from him but heard the waves crashing on its rocky surface.
It was a very beautiful sight, all things considered, and he was glad to have set out on the walk despite the cold and the wet. Suddenly he felt very silly for having been mad about travelling another night, and felt even sillier for being mad at his brother because of it. He then considered how his brother most likely hadn’t paid for anyone else’s lodgings, and how he had paid for him just so that he would come. Imagine that! He said out-loud to himself, the words muted by the snow a few inches from his face—he almost hadn’t come to his own brother’s wedding because of a reason as meaningless and as selfish as the order of which one of them was married first. He looked back out over the lake and stared towards the horizon, un-focusing his eyes until his field of view began to turn completely black, and the only thing left in view was the tree-line jutting up from the ground in great spires.
How could he have thought so selfishly for so long? It was as if every idea and feeling in his head was stirred up in some new way, and looking back at his actions, could not understand in the slightest the motives that had driven them. Once again, the only feeling that made any sort of sense was his loneliness, yet standing in front of the slowly rolling waves, which gave entire lake the illusion that it was creeping away from him, he could seldom explain its pervasiveness in his soul. He had the sudden and intense urge to walk out into the lake and swim to the other side, as if by joining the waves and following them to their rocky, black end, he could uncover an answer. But smartly he thought otherwise, and refocused his eyes, turning his attention away from the lake and back on the road ahead of him.
With the amount of snow that was falling now, he worried that soon the road may be covered entirely, and he wouldn’t be able to find his way back, and figured it was best to start back to the cabin. But he realized he hadn’t had the chance to smoke yet, and he still felt as if the walk was in direct defiance of a strange force that had set over him long ago, and had not loosened its hold on him since. Not smoking, the very thing he set out to do would be a concession to this feeling, and that, he knew for sure, he could not abide. But he also knew that to smoke properly and comfortably he would need a shelter, he thought, and so he continued in the opposite direction of his lodgings, looking for a suitable spot to sit for a while and smoke.
Luckily it wasn’t much farther down the road before he spotted in the darkness what looked like such a shelter. From where he stood it looked like a small shed not too far off the road in the center of a large clearing, and turning off the road to walk towards it, he saw that it was a run-down farmhouse, crooked and barely holding up under its own weight. The ground off of the pavement however, must’ve been blanketed in a foot of snow, and his boots and pants were quickly soaked through entirely. It was not only their wetness that worried him, but also the fact that the farther he ventured off of the road, the farther away this strange farmhouse seemed to appear. Not before long, and not even halfway there, he found himself trudging through snow that rose up to his waist. Without warning, the great waves of thought that he had been holding back began to crash on top of him with their full force. The full weight of his aloneness, and every feeling and thought associated with it became horribly fixed at the center of his imagination, and he could not remove his attention off of it nor think of anything else. Every interaction that he had ever had, every memory that came to him was immediately colored by this sense of loneliness, not only ruining them individually, but then having become lonely memories themselves, fed directly into this huge idea, and painting increasingly large swathes of his life in their lonely light.
Why are people around if just to remember with so much melancholy? What even was the purpose of memory if just to enshrine others this way in sadness? He looked around and watched the wind lift huge gusts of snow off the ground, the streetlamps flicker dimly in the now far off distance; everything would eventually leave him—in a day all of this would be gone, and these things would all be gone, left only in his mind to be transformed slowly but surely into pure sadness. He had the thought that it would be better to stop looking around, stop taking note of the world entirely if it meant avoiding this terrible process. With each successive thought, the previous would grow cold and whither away, further convincing him of this lonely idea. And yet thoughts like these continued to arise in his head, shine briefly, present a terrible reality to him, and just as quickly disappear, only for the next one to take its place. He sensed a kind of impending doom, as if these thoughts continued to flood his mind like this, he would have to put an end to his life just to stop their merciless arrival.
Physically and violently he shook his head. Memory must serve some other purpose than this. A single hopeful thought suddenly arrived; he didn’t know what this purpose was, but the declaration was better than nothing. He held the thought in place for as long as he could, and when it finally disappeared, found that the onslaught had stopped.
He opened his eyes. (They had been open the entire time, in fact; he just hadn’t been seeing out of them. Finally coming to, however, he felt that he had suddenly gained a new and novel sense of sight, much like the sensation of opening ones eyes after a long and fitful sleep). Suddenly, he was standing only a few feet from the dark wooden farmhouse he had seen from off in the distance. Eager to get inside and warm himself, but unable to find a door lock in the blackness, he put his hands on the wood and began to walk the perimeter of the small shed, pushing at various intervals. His hands were numb on the splintery frozen wood, but turning a corner and pushing hard, having grown inpatient, he fell directly forwards and landed in a pile of hay and what by its smell could only be cow manure.
He rose to his knees and wrinkled his face at the smell, but he was glad he had gotten inside, and pleased at how warm it was. He was still for a moment, and noticed a sound that joined him in the dark—a deep, heavy blowing that could have been the rumbling of train tracks, if not only for its rhythmic swelling, unmistakably that of a breathing creature. He fumbled forwards on his knees with his hands outstretched, and not before he crawled ten feet did both hands plant firmly on a warm hairy hide, growing and shrinking under his fingertips. He froze for a moment, afraid the cow might wake up and attack, but it sat still, breathing without hesitation or apparent notice of him at all, and his frozen hands still on the hide began to thaw. The cow’s continued breathing reassured him, and he slid his body down against her, first folding his elbows, planting the side of face against her, then turning around so that he was crouched in the hay beside her. His knees were pulled up to his chest and his entire back stretched out against her broad side. Still there was no sudden movement, and so he leaned back with the full of his weight and closed his eyes. The barn not fifteen feet ahead of him was wide open, but lying there, the creeping cold was barely noticeable. The storm had picked up even, and from his spot facing the open door, he watched the sky grow opaque with snow.
On his back he could feel the beating squeezing of distant organs from somewhere deep within the cow. He turned his head to the side, and listening now with his ear pressed up against her, he heard each coarse breath fill her lungs, the cud push through her complicated stomachs, her hot blood pump mercilessly. All at first constituted a single sound, but just by listening they began to pull apart, and soon each became a new and separate instrument, playing independently and vigorously yet still as part of a whole.
He pulled out his pipe, filled it with a pinch of tobacco from his inside pocket, lit it with a match, and began to puff on the whole thing, savoring the bitter and fragrant taste filling his mouth and nose. His head grew light from the smoke, and everything in his vision became similarly buoyant. The stacked crates and farm tools in front of him looked as if they were only merely in contact with the ground, and not being bound by gravity, could float away with the slightest touch or gust of wind.
Everything was laden with meaning. The snow floating through the open door, the air carrying it, the hay it landed on, each burst forth with a life that he had never noticed before, and yet which now seemed so obviously important to understanding his situation. Every new object that he focused on held such indescribable significance—it was a beauty that existed solely for this moment; no memory or thought would ever able to replicate it. The feelings that had plagued him not so long ago, all of which seemed so overwhelming and important to him, now seemed to pale in comparison to the smallest object he could find in the barn. His loneliness even felt almost inconsequential when placed next to a blade of hay lying in the muddy snow. A wave of belonging washed over him. He shared something very fundamental with every being, animate or inanimate, in the world—especially the cow behind him. All of them were experiencing this same odd feeling, and all moving through it together, they were indistinguishable from each other in their share of it.
He knew suddenly and assuredly that he would have no recollection of this feeling, and no matter how hard he tried, he would never be able to return to this moment in his mind. He chuckled a bit upon this realization, and settled back a bit further into the hay and the cow, continuing to puff on his wooden pipe. Its flame had long been extinguished, and nothing was left of it but a thin trail of smoke.