I didn’t know you wanted the one-hitter. We were both sober, after all. Had been for the handful of years we’d been married. Which is why it was so funny that you got the job with the dispensary. Colorado had just passed the pot-is-legal law, which opened up a job for you. Regardless that you had a master’s degree in technical communication, you refused to get a better job than delivering pizzas. It was something about your upbringing. About how you always thought you didn’t deserve what you worked hard for and that life was just one big un-ending struggle. So with your master’s degree, you did pizza delivery. And when dispensaries opened up, someone had to deliver the weed from the weed warehouse to the weed stores across the state. You got the job and we laughed about how the last time you “delivered” drugs was in college. Work experience!
You enjoyed your job. From picking up the pot to delivering it to the pot stores that at times were a six-hour drive away, you barely had to interact with any humans. Perfect for your people-avoidance tendencies.
I didn’t think the one-hitter was important to you. It was just a plain little glass one-hitter pipe that one of the stores tipped you with.
When we were packing up to move, I gave AJ the one-hitter. I’m a gift-giver and it was just sitting on the stove, and you didn’t smoke pot but AJ was a stoner, so I figured you didn’t need it and he would use it. “It meant something to me,” you said after AJ left, the top right corner of your lip doing its twitching madly thing. Pavlov-like, my heart sped up a bit at the sight of that twitch. I knew I had done something wrong. I’m sorry I thought the one-hitter was just a one-hitter and not a symbol of I don’t know what.
Being a legal drug runner made you realize you wanted to start your own delivery service, so you bought a cargo van we couldn’t afford even though we already had two cars and I didn’t say anything about that purchase, like how a few months later when I took you to the mental health crisis center at 2 a.m. because you ripped the glass top off your metal desk—eyes all textbook crazy-like, top lip twitching, me praying you would just get on medication already because your moods and paranoia were always my fault, of course, because even though I was asleep that night I had somehow pissed you off, somehow incited your rage while I slept—and I didn’t say anything when you told the social worker at the mental health crisis center that you had a plan. That your plan was to go to Home Depot and get a hose and drive somewhere in your van and put it in the exhaust pipe and through the window and do it that way, and I didn’t say anything about that, though I did wonder why you would use the van when it would be much quicker to do it in your little Saturn. That was when I knew for reals that you really were not right in the head—not that you ever had been—because the plan just wasn’t logical.
I didn’t saying anything about the lack of logic back then, but a few years later I did finally come to my senses, did finally think about the logic of our marriage and its lack, and I finally said, “I can’t do this anymore” when I jumped out of your van at a stop light in Las Vegas. I was sick of watching your top right lip twitch, sick of how it quickened my heartbeat, sick of how it was always prompted by your paranoia that I was trying to pull a power move over you, like when I insisted on buying dinner that night in Vegas and you started berating me about it in the van on the way home, claiming I treated you like you were my “pet,” or like when I gave AJ the one-hitter that I still don’t know why it was important to you, but that doesn’t matter now because when I finally realized it, finally screamed back, “I can’t do this anymore” and jumped out of your van, I knew I no longer had to believe you were important to me.
*****
Photography Credit: Jason Rice
Chelsey Clammer is the author of Circadian (winner of the Red Hen Press Nonfiction Manuscript Award) and BodyHome. She is a Pushcart Prize-nominated essayist who has been published in Brevity, Salon, The Rumpus, Hobart, The Normal School, Essay Daily, The Water~Stone Review and Black Warrior Review, among many others. She teaches creative writing online with WOW! Women On Writing. Clammer holds in MFA in Creative Writing from Rainier Writing Workshop. You can read more of her writing at: www.chelseyclammer.com.
