This one is a little raw, so forgive me

Tonight I walked like three miles around my neighborhood with a cigarette hanging from my lower lip and a lighter in my pocket that I kept bringing out to flick every fucking block. I would hold the yellow Bic’s flickering flame tantalizingly close to my lips—and the dangling American Spirit—as my combat boots stomped down the sidewalk in my majority-minority neighborhood. I would think about how goddamn good it would feel to smoke it. Did you know that in King County, where Seattle is, my home, 24% of our residents are foreign-born? They came from somewhere else to be here, in my city, because they thought they could build a life here.

Do you know how bad you miss cigarettes after a decade of smoking them?

When I set out to walk tonight I really did intend to just have a fucking cigarette and ease the tension inside me. I quit smoking for probably the third time about four months ago, after I relapsed (again) so I could get through my mother’s funeral when she died suddenly of cancer. Hers wasn’t from smoking. Just shit luck. 

After the funeral when I quit for the third time, I left the half-smoked pack of Camel reds in the yellow porcelain dish that sits atop my microwave full of keys and coins and various bullshit as a reminder that I had quit again not because I didn’t have a lack of availability to cigarettes, but because I wanted to stop. My wife wanted me to, and those fucking things were killing my lungs. I couldn’t walk a mile without albuterol. So I stopped and every day for the past three months I look at the pack of Camels in the dish when I grab my house keys and I don’t even feel the temptation because I remember why I quit. 

Tonight though I threw a cigarette into my bottom lip and tied up my stupid fucking combat boots—you know how long it takes to lace twelve rows of Corcorans?—and then marched outside with Gil Scott-Heron crooning in my earbuds and flicked the lighter and looked at it as I stomped down my urban street in Seattle, because I am so fucking mad I could die, as the state keeps killing good people for being good. I smoke because I cannot handle this shit—I started with it as an addiction after one too many days at a shit job with a bipolar boss—and I gotta relieve the tension. I’m tense again. This would help, for a little bit.

And then I thought about how bad my asthma is. This last bout of smoking–the one after my mom died—really exacerbated it. I have had asthma since I was two years old and the nine years of half-a-pack-a-day American Spirits since college didn’t really make it much worse, I swear, but for whatever reason the two months of Camels after my mom died really fucked me up, and I need a little steroid puffer just to walk outside when it’s cold now.

I’ve never been tear gassed, not out of a desire not to be. Let me tell you I am frothing for some action. Paradoxically, I am also fucking scared, mostly of going to jail. I try my goddamn best when I go out these days, but when I see the paddy wagons roll up I usually bounce, because I know what they do to girls that look like me in jail and I am not that brave. I wish I were. 

Anyway, despite my cowardice, I know the day that I get gassed is coming. After Philando and George, and now Renee and Alex, my entire adult life of the system promising it would stop killing my neighbors and yet continuing to murder them in cold blood, I am not fucking living through this decade without choking on some goddamn tear gas. Send a grenade into my living room for all I care. The response to caring about your neighbors is getting tear gassed, apparently. So I will get tear gassed because I love my neighbors, all of them, but especially those immigrants who came here to find a future just like I did, the one place that would support us in the world after having been shut out of everywhere else. Seattle’s great like that.

Anyway, having asthma and getting tear gassed is bad for you. Scientifically, people with asthma are three times more sensitive to tear gas; anecdotally, I accidentally pepper sprayed myself in my own living room once and I was heaving on my inhaler like it was a scuba mask and I was three thousand leagues under the fucking sea. I know that irritants are not going to be good for me if I can’t walk around the block. They are designed to choke you so you stop resisting and I will not stop resisting. 

So I walked down the street and I flicked the lighter and thought about the temptation in a little bit of a Biblical sense, you know? Like. This cigarette would be the only dopamine my fuckin’ brain’s had in the past two weeks since they executed that lesbian mom in her Honda Pilot for trying to film her neighbors getting kidnapped. If you’ve never smoked, good, don’t, but if you have you know that flood of dopamine that relapsing brings. That’s why we do it. It’s so goddamn good. 

I’m marching down the street, stomping my stupid combat boots, with this cigarette dangling from my lower lip. I can taste the tobacco through the filter as my spit soaks into the end of it. I don’t have a job anymore and I don’t have a career—I’m a writer and they’ve invented a robot that can write well enough to sell bunion ads, so that career’s dead. And I’m a fucking transgender woman after the rest of this society decided we’re all write-offs, So there’s no reason to hold back. I keep getting rejected for minimum-wage jobs. Cancer is a luxury. The lighter beckons.

I’m thirty. I’m not living past 36 if we don’t fix this shit now, I know that. That cigarette is basically free. There’s no reason to not light up… except the tear gas. I gotta get tear gassed. I need to choke on the fascist grenades and survive. I must live and fight until my death truly cannot be avoided any longer, and then my body must be a testament against the sins of fascism, so hopefully it might end, like how Alex and Renee and the people of Minneapolis have told us we must resist this with our lives. 

The pleasure of this nicotine would be the only relief I’ve felt in weeks. 

But I gotta be in good shape to get tear-gassed so I just hold the cigarette in my lip and I think about my home and my neighbors. I think about how goddamn good it would taste to light it, to breathe in the relaxation, to exhale the cloud of my tension. I just keep fucking walking. My neighbors. I gotta get tear-gassed. I reject the temptation. Let me live so that I might stop these motherfuckers, that’s all I ask, I’ll do my part. If we win I’ll have my goddamn smoke then.