I was coughing blood today. No lie. Not a lot of blood, sure – I was in no danger of losing precious liters – but it was blood nonetheless. Little specks that stained my tissue, like red snowflakes against an all-white sky.
I was coughing blood today. No lie. I guess it’s the chickens coming home to roost. For the sickly child I was, I’ve abused my lungs too much, for too long. I smoked marijuana daily for like seven years, and that's not exactly past tense behavior. For a long time I smoked cigarettes too – and unfiltered Luckies, no less. During a dark and desperate time in my life I was a fiend for nitrous oxide. I’ve smoked PCP. I’ve smoked opium. I’ve smoked salvia divinorum. Christ, I’ve even smoked orange Tic-Tacs, or tried to though they refused to burn. Did I miss anything? Oh, cloves. I also smoked clove cigarettes – again, a dark and desperate time in my life. The point is, if my childhood was marked by various respiratory ailments, my adult life has been characterized by my complete and utter lack of concern for said respiratory ailments. I always joked that I’d know it was time to quit when I started coughing up blood. Now that I have...
I was coughing blood today, no lie, and now I don’t know what to do. I’m afraid to get it checked out, for two reasons. First, because I am scared that this is the beginning of the end, that I have finally done one stupid thing to my body too many, that these specks of blood represent the punctuation at the end of my sentence. But I am also afraid that it won’t turn out to be anything fatal or terminal or even anything serious at all – that after all the coughing is said and done, after the blood has all dried up and the tissues are long discarded, it will be back to business as usual, and I will still have to wake up every day as I get older and more bitter. That I could still live long enough to see my fire die slowly instead, from flame to ember to ash.
I was coughing blood today. No lie.
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