Circadian

    Mark first started smoking when he was 14 years old, and from the moment his trembling lips first touched that fiberglass olive branch resting between his smokey fingertips, he felt more alive than he ever had before.
     A formaldehyde kiss, coded into the history of the world when he stomped that butt out, scarring the landscape that so kindly held him upright in this too-big world.
    "So what was your first cigarette like?" he asked John.
    "I dunno, man. I don’t like to dwell on things like that, I just like to live life as happily as I can, no matter how fast it comes at me. I don’t like to reminisce over old memories."
    He loved John for this. Jack Kerouac might have called him "eccentric about life," and he would have been right. John reminded Mark of Neal Cassady (renamed Dean Moriarty in Kerouac’s "On The Road.")
       He dug life.
    The two made their way to an old bridge towering over a peaceful river, and cut down the middle by a set of weathered copper railroad tracks. They looked around, and although it was a beautiful day, someone surveying the scene might have felt a hint of sadness towards the boys, who had no idea what amazing memories they were airbrushing into their minds, only to be swept up and lost in the current of that river one day, along with the rest of them.
    It was getting dark out. Mark lit up a butt. His lungs filled with that spectral smoke like a balloon being filled with helium, as every inhale and exhale eroded that cigarette closer, closer, closer to the filter, and the weightless ashes floated to the ground like a beautiful New England snowstorm. John had always admired the grace with which Mark smoked, and nothing had changed.
    "It’s mad nice out," John exclaimed, and he exhaled a saturated cloud of pearly white smoke. There had been something wrong with his lungs growing up, and he coughed every time he took a drag.
    "Yeah, it is. We should go out tonight."
    "Sounds good to me. We should get high with Craig then go chill on the tracks."
    "I’m in."
    Mark sat on John’s bed, anxious for midnight to roll around, his face consumed by the computer’s radiant azure aura, and a hungry look in his eyes.
    He looked at John.
"Is it just me, or is that clock moving slower than a f*****g paraplegic turtle?"
"I know what you mean," he laughed.
    The two of them waited and waited, and although it seemed to take a lifetime, all three of that clocks hands eventually overlapped each other, pointing exhilarantly at the number twelve.
    John leapt up in excitement.
"Yes!"

          Stoned.
                            Ripped.
                                              Twisted.

    It didn’t matter where they were anymore. Any sense of paranoia was blown away in the excitement and hot pursuit of the night.
        Walking Walking Walking Walking.
    As John and Craig spoke in foreign tongues, mouths moving rapidly, all Mark could think about was how he wanted more.
More cool night air to fill his lungs with.
More excitement to storm his body.
More love to stimulate his heart.
more.
More.
MORE.
    He could almost hear the way John would say it as they set sail:
       "Yes! This is it, man! We are upon the brink of embarking on the greatest adventure of our lives! And if we reach the end of the Earth, we’ll keep on going, we’ll keep on burning!"

    That night i was so f*****g high...

Years, days, hours, minutes, seconds later.

    He opened his eyes and the world began to turn again.
What had just happened here?
    They had defied all that was moral and right, and he never dug Jackie more than he did that very moment.
       "I’ll see you later."
    She smiled and walked out the door, and he stood there forever, loving the way she said it.
    The rotor was accelerating and he spun around in an illusive haze, full of love and temptation and joy and desire.
       Suddenly that room was filled with an almost comically exuberant beauty, pulsating with the rhythm of halcyonic, cascading melodies, and exploding in blissful euphoria.

F**k.
The angels had tangled all their love up in knots.
Or so they thought.
(April) fools.
And it was a good one.

So they began going together.

    "Someone messed up love," Jackie said, and in response to Mark’s inquiring look, she pointed at the decoration hanging on the wall in front of them, whose driftwood letters sadly spelled "vole." She had noticed the one thing he hadn’t, and his heart filled up with affection for her as she gently got up and switched the letters back to their original form, creating the prettiest word he had come to know, as he sat there, digging it all.
    To this day that heart still pumps blood like gasoline into that prosthetic engine, repeating and repeating it’s circadian rhythm like a clock on the wall, cycling through time without a single look back, burning and burning and burning.

I got too fucked up again and passed out on the bridge.