It cost $28 and change for my dissolution. A fair price for a sharp-edged peace. $6 for a pack of Virginia Slims menthol lights longs – the 120s – and $19 for a bottle of lime tequila which actually tastes good. I chose well. They complimented each other nicely in the smoky, candle-lit dimness of my laundry room last night – the room with no furniture to soak up the cigarette smoke. I avoid smoking for as long as possible because I can’t stand the smell which still lingers lightly over my house. I seem to breathe it out even now. It has been so many years since I smoked that I have no memory of the last time I smoked a pack, yet I recall at any given moment with crystal clarity my brand.
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I huddled in my laundry room on my intensely uncomfortable stepladder and hunched my way through a series of disconnected streams of consciousness, never achieving anything like the oblivion I craved but not surprised, either. I never was adept at being dissolute.
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I took drag after lovely, long-missed drag and thought of the peculiar irony that my hatred of children and my weaknesses swirling in that glass tumbler of mine could have no effect yet on my deep-rooted belief that I had much to teach my children. I thought how children should learn from their mothers and fathers – their most trusted ones – that humans are weak creatures, and yet they shouldn’t learn it too soon or too suddenly, and that it must be a coil for parents to figure out how to tread that line.
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The cigarettes and the tequila didn’t necessarily make me feel better, but they just made me feel not so bad. Made the numbness not shiver and crack so easily. That’s the thing about numbness that I knew before but forget every time I put it away: it never stays the same. It’s like the sea – always shifting but essentially staying in about the same space.
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It is with a queer relief that I notice that all my music is gone – no emotion to be found in any of the rich memories turned stick-figure associations. That no book quite reaches me anymore. That thoughts of running lay flat and still within me. Somehow, it is the numbness of the good feelings – to which I had clung so long and so very recently – that reinforce my belief in the numbness of the bad feelings. It is being unable to feel the loss of all these things which had been essential, had been the last splinters from the wreckage to cling to, that confirms to me that, yes, I am numb. I am deadened.
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And it is a good thing, too, or I probably would have reacted far worse than a closet smoker and drinker to the impromptu conference with Sherry and Langley yesterday, during which I learned that they have no confidence in my abilities or integrity, to remove out-of-hand a student based on a false witness by a parent without checking any of the facts with me, and also that all my Herculean efforts to come back from the hellish start to the school year and improve my relations with the kids and all those times when I did react calmly and fairly have, in fact, been worth nothing. All that I have done to do my job well, which was already far more than I was capable of giving, has now been rated as “not good enough” and I am now exhorted to do better, which I am not able to do. So I am left here with a bill I cannot fill, and I still have five months left. God help me.
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But there is no one. There is no help, no aid, no relief. Despite my fear that medication would endanger the numbness of which I am so protective, I can see I have no other option. I need the strongest medication at the highest dosage. I work both with children and with a hatred of children. I am constantly held to an expectation that is impossible for me to meet. I have no comfort, no love, no small pleasures, no tears. I am a shell and a husk, and I will walk in there tomorrow to face all the little pairs of spy eyes and betray nothing. And I will do this until I can start the heavy drugs. I have been reduced to this and the part of me that would object, that would care, is – you guessed it – numb. I am dead.
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