I like having something to recover from. I harm myself in excess: bleak gluttony, black tar indulgence. So that I can find solace in the fixing. The sauna, the detox, the lemon water, the immunity shot. The muscle massage, the long walk on the treadmill. I swear rebirth upon myself like a ceremony, like I can play cards with divinity. The stimuli of trying to wean off of something is intoxicating, and for a second I’m no longer me, with the Marlboros and the quicksand, wielding self-punishment close like a limb, like hot breath. I’m no longer the girl with the smoking gun, I’m new: baptized, washed, levitating in the liminality of hopefulness.  Rebranding my entire life on Pinterest, rejecting the concept of a Saturn Return, twenty-seven and suddenly interested in ice plunges and hiking.

I think that a lot of what I am, what I’ve always been,  is inherently dirty, so I indulge the sickest parts of myself all at once, thinking that I’ll get so nauseous and so done with being me that they will leave my system in one fell swoop. I do this with smoking the rest of the pack before midnight, because at midnight I’m cinderella, I’m gone, I’m gone, I’m new, baby. Brand new. I used to do it with  the drinking before I got sober, with the starting the diet tomorrow, with giving up the boy, the girl, the screentime. Postponing the way that I am completely incapable of handling pleasure by swearing that discipline is the next destination. It allows me to forgive myself for a couple of minutes, to not be sorry, because I’m stopping. Because I will prove my nobility through the fasting and the cleanse. I will prove that I am just as worthy of being alive as the people who are good enough not to voluntarily damage their bodies. Sometimes I wonder how much of what I do is voluntary. If I’m just the way that someone made me. But I guess it doesn’t matter how you became what you are, it’s your job to fix it. Nihilistically, I’m  like - ok, fix it and for what? It’s how I cope and also fuck you. But spiritually, I know that it holds me back, all of it does. Stopping drinking wasn’t the end of my story.

I went to hypnotherapy on the first of July, almost a year to the date after I got sober,, so that I could shed the skin of the last vile thing about me. I said goodbye to the smell and the pacifier, the cold air, the alone time. I said goodbye again and again, for hundreds of dollars, until the man with the long silver hair on the other end of the screen decided that I had completed enough guided meditation to be a healthy non-smoker for life. Four months later, in December, I cracked, using the fact that my partner and I had just separated and that she’d cheated on me, to justify the smoking. I hurt myself when other people hurt me. Call that poor pattern recognition.

When I was twenty-two, I lived in a rental house in a shitty, dirty, cold town in Southern New Jersey. The town had vape shops, pizza shops, Wawa, and red-brick apartment complexes. Cigarette ash crusted the wood floors, a sad blue couch was merlot stained and sunken in, dust collected on the window sills, wine-sticky mason jars sat stacked haphazardly like Jenga in the metal sink. It was always slightly cold, especially in my bedroom, because my bedroom used to be the garage and we’d keep the door half open all of the time, sticking our limbs and cigarettes out into the gray air like it mattered. The rental was in a neighborhood right behind the highway, so at most hours of the night, the subtle whir of trucks could be heard, a low and consistent buzz in the distance. I liked this part of it. It reminded me of New York. The sunlight was so rare that it seemed intrusive when it did come, pouring over the place in a strange, golden bath that none of us knew what to do with.

The feeling of smoking cigarettes again, years later, in the winter sun, sadness hanging heavy in my stomach like a poorly digested dinner, it put me right back on that wood floor, criss-cross apple sauce with Rita and Evan and Annie. It made me feel sick. The stale taste of the Marlboros, the meaninglessness of the afternoon, the reminder that there was a time in my life when I couldn’t keep a job, pay rent, stay sober. I couldn’t do anything to take care of myself and even more so than worthless, it made me feel impure. I internalized that part of my life, which led me to believe terrible things about myself, like I narrowly avoided a certain aimless fate that I certainly would’ve been prisoner to and ridiculed for and that any semblance of that behavior could put me back there.

I would drive over the Tacony Bridge to my teaching job at a charter school, still drunk from the night before, whizzing through the blue dark, the stale aftertaste of Corona being balanced by the peppermint mocha caffeinated Wawa milkshake I’d procure every morning. My head would hurt from the sugar, and everyday at 11 am, exactly, I’d walk the kids to lunch and go sit in my sedan on the Philly streets to smoke. Sometimes they’d catch me and they’d point and chortle from the recess courtyard. Eventually, another staff member told me that I wasn’t allowed to leave the building on lunch breaks. I shrugged. I felt apathy about my teaching job. They’d hired me out of college to teach English, but I ended up teaching social studies instead, last minute, because there had been some kind of clerical mistake. The whole thing was blatantly ludicrous, considering I had no background in education or history - but I’d mostly just pass out Word Searches and beg for them to stop yelling at one another and running around the room, because it only made the hangover migraines worse. Do you ever feel like you’re just.. Thrown to the wolves? Thrown into the world? I was in New Jersey and I was in outer space. I was running from my body and my brain, scared that I’d never have anywhere better to go.

The Christmas string lights in the living room never came down, and they hung clunkily around a red Mandala tapestry.  Evan would sit on the couch smoking weed and playing guitar hero. Occasionally, he’d stand up on the wood coffee table, icy eyes juxtaposed by mania’s blaze and he’d make psychosis induced speeches about how he was destined to get famous and run the world. He was a pizza delivery driver, on and off, for the same place, who kept letting him go and rehiring him when he’d beg. His car was so bacteria ridden, full of old slices and Mcdonald’s that it was absolutely growing new species of mold. He made SoundCloud music in his bedroom, on two monitors and talked to grown women in the adult entertainment industry online, multiple of whom he swore he was going to fly out and save. 
One night Evan and I got so drunk on grape liquor that we started making out in the shower, the tiny stream of water not sufficient enough to keep either of us warm, so that we were just two semi-lubricated bodies slapping up against each other with unnecessary, fumbling, drunken force. We did this in malice. Because Evan and Rita were known to fool around, and Rita had become withdrawn from the group, taking more pills, sleeping a ton and being more secretive. Rita was my friend, but I was hurt by her silence, and so Evan said, “This’ll show her,” and followed me to my room. Then he said, “I’ve been wanting to do this forever,” as he slipped inside and I felt my stomach lurch. This seemed, suddenly, less like we were two comrades sitting in the same pain and more like he was getting away with something. I didn’t stop him, I stared at the ceiling, felt his bony, sweaty arms wrap around me when it was done. “I need Plan B,” I said. The sky was light purple, as the sun teased an appearance casting gentle half shadows into the chilly room. I felt dirty and cheap. Every man that I let into that room, in that bed, in that house, was self-harm. They wanted one thing and I wanted everything. Not from them, but from the world. I wanted more from the world, from myself. I didn’t know where to start and I felt vile, fundamentally broken by the truth that I could’ve ever let it get so bad.

The hangovers were as regular as a ritual, especially on the weekends. I’d wake up, dry eyes, head screaming, gagging, chest tight, make-up all over my face and sometimes my neck and collarbones. We’d pile into our friend Dylan’s car and hand crumpled bills to the Dunkin drive-thru works with trembling hands, sipping sugary lukewarmth that only dehydrated us further.  Once we went to a concert in Philly, Rita smeared black eye shadow on my lids with her thumbs because I was too hungover to get ready on my own, and I drank until Dylan dropped us off at the venue, feeling like my body was composed of panic and radio static. I spilled vodka crans in the bathroom and blacked out in the audience, pushing my way through the crowd to get to the front, all night-lined sockets and unruly curls beneath an old beanie. I was a ghost.

I crawled out of that hole defiantly. Tooth and nail. Blacked my way out through an ivy league degree. One hundred trains to New York. Another apartment. Better friends. Until finally, sobriety. Until finally, a smoke free life. A stable partner. Then, it all came crashing down again.  And so I realized, now, years later, in smoking on the porch, that I have become addicted to the process of undoing. So addicted to the process of undoing that I will cause the pain, just to feel hope that things can be normal and that I can fix myself again. So addicted to the push and pull of seeing how bad things can get, and how much worse I an ma