Rebellion is Sweet and Light

She inhales, sharply, and the gas enters her lungs. This isn't the kind of thing she usually does, or at least that's what she tells herself, as she leans against the wall of the Starbucks bathroom and sounds are louder and more intense than they were before. Her head feels disconnected from her body, the room tilts as if she is watching herself from above. She looks in the mirror and her eyes glint, she sees a mischevous smile dance across her face as her pupils dilate, she smiles back. This isn't the kind of thing she usually does, she's not the girl to get high off of aerosol whipped cream cans in a Starbucks bathroom, but at this moment, she doesn't care. Somebody knocks on the door shooting panic through her limbs. She flushes the toilet, even though she hasn't used it, puts the can to her lips, sucks in until she tastes whipped cream. The second hit is better than the first. She leaves the bathroom and doesn't hold it open for the woman who had knocked, the woman opens it herself, mutters under her breath, Stupid bitch. She staggars through the store, out to Fourteenth street and Sixth Avenue, remembering waiting on line behind a woman shooting up at a McDonalds bathroom in Soho. She remembers the way the woman walked in, nervous, intense, touching something in her pocket. Five minutes later she walked out again, loose, indirect movements, satisfied.  Fourteenth street and Sixth turns sideways and rightens itself, the cars are suddenly louder. Rebellion is sweet and light and costs 3.69 at Gristedes. She tucks Rebellion into her bag, catches the downtown 2 train at Seventh Avenue with her green student metrocard, swings her backpack back over her shoulder. This isn't the kind of thing she usually does.
* * *
It started at Twenty-third street and Ninth Avenue, on somebody's fire escape at 10:07 PM. The fire escape she remembers clearly--the feel of the black paint coated with rain water beneath her bare feet, the sounds of traffic and music somebody is playing inside, Dance with the Devil, Immortal Techniqe. The tastes she remembers clearly too, an avalanche of smoke rolling off of her tongue. Two days later, there it is in the back of her throat like clockwork, sense memory. The taste perpetuated it, she wanted it again--not necessarily that same avalanche of smoke, that same experience, but the feeling, the drop in her stomach, breaking the rules. She fleetingly wonders, then, if addiction is chemical or theoretical, whether people skydive to fly or skydive to resist falling. She pushes the thought from her mind, Rebellion for the sake of itself. These are things she can reflect on later, when her bones are less strong and she's seen more. Insight is overrated, she thinks, closing her eyes to it, blocking it from her understanding. She gets up, climbs down the stairs of the fire escape she is sitting on for a second time recently, and walks back inside, where everyone is laughing about something. She doesn't get it, but she laughs anyway.
* * *
There are days with nothing, days she carves out of the linoleum block that is her life. There have always been these days, like negatives to the things she wants to remember, counterparts for her freedom. She used to recognize these days as necessary--a white to every black, but lately, as Karma begins to fail her, she pushes for more black and less white, less sky and more moon. She is not self-defined by the things that she does, but rather the absence of those things. The lack of authority becomes a given, so much that she questions the simplest of rules, thinks people are joking when they actually study for a test, stay in on a Friday night and watch a movie with their families. These anomalies shatter her vision of the life she is trying to simulate, but rather than ignoring them, she conforms to them. The linoleum block gathers layers. One day, she pulls her hair into a braid, tucking Rebellion into her purse that she bought at Claire's. The Wildlife Conservation shirt she cut up reflects Rebellion, is Rebellion, is thus kept. Innocence becomes ironic; heartbreak is to be used sparingly--it can be either beautiful or typical. She tries to be different by writing things on her hands and sometimes these things are read and sometimes they are ignored. She laughs at jokes and sometimes these jokes are actually funny and sometimes they are not.
* * *
The Wildlife Conservation shirt is among the load that gets switched at the laundromat and is replaced with a simple black one, as pain becomes more pronounced and less of a thing to be ashamed of. Rebellion is no longer Rebellion but habit, sense memory is perpetuated only by chemical addiction. She no longer strives for irony, she simply becomes it. One day she is crying and she realizes that she doesn't want people to see her cry, this time, to make a point. She cries anyway, though, she knows that secrets can be uncovered but if she hides nothing there is nothing to find. In this train of scattered thought, she realizes that she is still laughing and it is loud and it is cruel and it echoes outside to a fire escape she never knew existed. To cross the threshold between the window and the escape, to dart down the stairs, braid coming undone, Rebellion getting lost inside of a fear of never being able to go back, is to cross those people she laughed for, to watch them watch her. She curls into a ball, falls to the floor of the bathroom of a Starbucks at Fourteenth and Sixth, and no matter how hard she tries, she can't stop laughing.