Trapped

You look out the window and notice how wrong the weather forecast was. Not surprising, didn’t your mom say something about how weather predictions have been off since the pandemic? Not as many planes in the air or something like that. The world seems to have slowed and the very air feels stiff and stagnant, the heat refusing to be cut by the promised rain. Weather’s still good, that means you can go out as planned. 

A couple weeks into the pandemic, you started doing drugs. Nothing serious, just smoking a little to pass the time. It’s odd and out of character for you. If friends ever described you it was always as the reliable one. The good one that’s called to organize birthday parties and look over projects. At first, you thought it would just be a lark, but you enjoyed it more than you anticipated. Each time you inhale, you feel as if it’s the first deep breath you’ve taken all day, the first time you’ve slowed down enough to notice your life; your beating heart, the sweat beneath your breasts, the pull of your breath, in and out, like a steady tide. 

If the weather is good, you like to take a long walk, deep into the woods. There, you crouch on a rock and smoke for a few hours. Today, it takes longer than usual to arrive. You’re sweating by the time you take a seat and you remember you planned to start working out. It seems as if everyone is doing something useful right now, something to justify the months away from activity. Scrolling through instagram at night all you see are photos of friends doing yoga, strumming guitar, or practicing a new language. What have you been up to? You light the pipe to avoid the thoughts and put your mouth against the end, sucking in. 

In reality, everyone is doing shit like this. Just trying anything to make themselves breath better, sleep better, to make time go faster and stop thinking about it. You lay back and focus on the seemingly impossible number of trees in front of you. As you focus more, their branches become sharper and more focused, each leaf suddenly discernible to the eye. You must be higher than you thought. On the walk here, you noticed the multitude squirrels zig-zagging around the path in front of you. Some kind of bird kept chittering and flying overhead, uncaring of your loud footsteps and heavy panting. Nature has become bold and unruly in our sudden absence.  

The trees come into focus again, this time swaying slightly, You’ve lost the last five seconds, or was that five minutes? You are higher than you thought. You shakily rise to your feet and wipe the loose pebbles off your ass, they leave dimpled imprints. The edges of your eyes feel unfocused, only the center of your perception remains dizzyingly clear. It’s not right. It’s not like last time. You don’t feel calmer, you feel trapped. Somewhere, muted and sunken in the back of your mind, a reasonable voice tells you to calm down, you’ve just smoked too much, it will be over soon. But you’re too tired and nervous to hear. It won’t be over, it’ll last forever. Didn’t some cheesy Lifetime movie in school tell you this would happen? The girl smoked a joint laced with something and lost her mind forever. It ended with the mother tearfully yelling at some teenage boy in a hoodie. 

You feel your heart pulsing rapidly under your hand, a river of sweat escapes your bra and trickles into your naval. It’s time to go. As you start walking your legs feel as thick and heavy as tree trunks. Have you gained that much weight since quarantine started? Dad did make some joke about the quarantine pound gain at dinner. You zap back to reality as you stumble over a root that stretches the path, clawed hand ready to trap you. How is you’ve only just reached the rooted section? This walk has become longer, has stretched miles. Your feet ache, a blister is forming under the thong of your left flipflop and a mosquito bite on your upper thigh is swollen and pulsing. 

You think of squatting in your tent last summer during the annual family camping trip, arms wound around your knees, waiting in misery for the flies to stop attacking your legs. You think of your legs again, they are too big. Dad thinks you need to loose weight. You wish your breasts were larger. You’ve only just reached the trail marker. How many hours have passed since you’ve began this walk? How many months have passed since you were ordered to stay inside?

As the path turns to gravel, your head swims. If mom tries to talk to you, you’re screwed. She still thinks you’re a virgin to everything. She makes you fast-forward through kissing scenes in tv shows. You remember her once twisting in the carseat to look at you after you made a risqué joke, the surprise on her face said what it needed to. During lockdown, she had become unbearable, anxiously hovering by the sink to monitor washed hands and sending novel-length texts about symptoms. Smoking was about escaping her as much as escaping your own mind.  

You’re not sure how you make it to your room unnoticed, but you manage it. You lay in your bed with the lights shut off, watching the fan lazily cutting through the air above. Inside, your thoughts flit about while bursts of anxiety squeeze through your chest. Has this all been brought on by too much weed, or was it always there? Being trapped in your mind this long, you realize that hell is actually too much introspection. 

In this moment, you make all kinds of promises. Make it end and you’ll actually do something of worth tomorrow. Make it end and you’ll never smoke again. The only honest one arrives last, make it end and you’ll feel better. Thats all you can do, promise that you’ll try to feel better once it’s all over. Maybe you’ll take a walk through the woods, sober, and actually cherish the wind on your skin or make enough noise to scare the squirrels away. Tomorrow, you’ll rise clear headed for the first time in weeks. You’ll pull a brush through your hair and put on makeup, even though no one can see. You’ll run through those woods and appreciate the fact that there’s no rain.