A week...almost

I had a dream this morning.

I was jogging. Then I was running. Running far and fast, I was laughing I couldn't keep myself from sprinting even when I meant to just keep a jogging pace. It was no where exotic, only among the usual routes in my neighborhood in Tempe, and this one area was highlighted. Where the sidewalk curves dramatically to the right and there is a street intersection the sidwalk one was just traveling on becomes only a week sprouted meridian where cars can whiz into, and it curves back to a fence where there is no "developement", just dirt, dust. Arizona is an ugly state, but I am awe of the beauty I am finding in its ugliness. I ran the fastest...in the dream...in this part of the neighborhood. I am not sure why.

I want to see this dream realized.

Last Sunday, not the most recent...well, I guess tomorrow is Sunday since today is Saturday (as logic follows), so it is the most recent Sunday after all. I had spent the day with a poorly folded Tempe bike map, gliding around the neighborhoods, enraptured by somehow ending up parallel to a canal or enfolded in these spine-shaped softly curved mesh/metal cords around a golf course, delighted at not knowing the landscape, not knowing where I would end up. At one point I came across horses. i rode up slowly to them, I felt them, they felt so lovely...I mean, I didn't physically touch them. I felt them looking at me, and I was sorry they were caged up.

After the bike ride, I decided to go for a jog. I knew gasping in the air into my lungs might make me more sick (and it was true, it did. the day after I woke, my feet and hands and legs and face were different temperatures), but I had to. I had figured out my cell phone could act as a timer. Up to this point, I had been using a song to measure out how long I was able to run until I was allowed to walk.

I mananged to run for almost 20 minutes straight. I felt each lung had cancerous swirls, psychiatrist black inky spots of cream in coffee, spilling over my pink cells, each sack wheezing in sadness at being asked to blow a balloon that couldn't possibly fill with air. I imagined the lungs exhibited at the Body World show, one that shows the gray, moth bitten lungs of a smoker. I wanted candy coated pink lungs, pepto-bismal, I don't want gray in me. I had to walk around the 6 minute mark, and I pushed myself. I made myself run to the end. I almost started crying at around 16 minutes.

But in my dream...I could run so well.

I became disasterously sick these last two weeks. I woke up Monday morning, very sick. I had two temp appointments, gone, vanished.

Even now my nostirls are crusty, thick, my throat pushes out gutteral coughs from my bony chest, I hack up large yellow balls of saliva, sometimes with dark maroon blood encased within the snot. I make myself sometimes catch the results in my palm, force myself to feel the weight of this addiction.

Sunday night, against my better judgment, I went out for beers. I did not bring cigarettes or buy a new pack, but I did smoke quite a few when out. When I woke up Monday, my nose, my lungs, everything hurt. So dry, I feel there is no skin or cartlidge in my nose, only bone, dry dark bone that smoke lingers cindery and gray and blackened by the desert night.

It has been since Sunday night that I have smoked.

I have in my green bag, a pack of American Spirits, one cigarette left. One lighter enclosed in the pack.

I just had a glass of wine (I just needed a desperate break from mango nectar, water, smoothies, green tea), and I had the urge to grab that cigarette and run outside and smoke it.

This morning when I felt there weren't concrete snakes writhing in my sinus tracts, I felt like I could smoke!

I don't want to smoke anymore. I really don't. I don't want the baby rattling in my ribs and lungs and throat of air trying, trying hard.