Cigarettes
Cigarettes
You light a cigarette as you watch the blue sky and wonder when you stopped hating the smell and the taste and started to appreciate the raw burning in your throat, the promising, lying, choking constriction of breath. The smoke curls into thin, artistic spirals; beautiful in showing something burning down through your drying throat and deep into your lungs, beautiful in its false promise of freedom as it turns your insides black and your fingers yellow.
You remember the first time you inhaled nicotine yourself instead of the cold after-image of smoke your parents used to leave behind within the house, and you think that somehow, your first smoke with your childhood friend was also the first time you lost your connection to him.
You remember the place well enough, the attic of the run-down garden hut that failed to completely block out the wind, the air within swirling with dust. Both of you were lying on an old mattress in front of an old, small TV screen that showed one of the shooter games that were becoming so popular lately. He told you that you had to breathe in deeply, and as you did, you fought back the choke creeping up your throat and swallowed the coughs until you were on your way home, because you were too stubborn to let yourself be out-willed, beaten, by something with no mind of its own. And as you watched the smoke curl almost artistically into the dusty air, the drumkit behind you glowing softly in the afternoon light and your friend's voice mingling with the gun's staccato from the screen in front of you, you try to relate, to understand as you used to and find yourself failing for the first time.
You were always the girl to scowl at alcohol and cigarettes and to swear you would never touch either of them; you do drink alcohol every now and then, and the cigarettes stuck with you ever since that afternoon, and even the coughs gave up eventually. Sometimes when you wonder why, you think that maybe this is your tribute to the boy you have grown so distant to, your personal memento of what you lost the day you broke your own promise. Sometimes you wonder what went wrong when you watched that cigarette burn and tried so hard to relate to what he said, because this is the boy who taught you that it's never wrong to be yourself and stand up for what you think, the boy who taught you that if you're bitten, you might as well bite back because your opinion is just as right as theirs, the boy who taught you some people are idiots and you have every right to say what you think because he likes you better than those idiots anyway.
Sometimes it's hard to remember, you know that, and as you put out the cigarette and watch that could-be tribute join the ashes of the previous ones, you wonder if it's any good to know just how often you forgot.
