The Smoke

The cigarette always burns faster at night.

I don't know if that's real, or if loneliness alters the perception of time the way alcohol does. But I notice it constantly. The same Marlboro that survives half a drive in daylight can disappear between two songs after midnight.

I watch the ember advance slowly in daylight, like a sunrise burning through black sky. But at night it's more like the light of a passing train when you're standing by the tracks. You hear it coming. You see light. You feel the displacement of wind. You can blink and miss the entire thing.

Maybe it's more than just timing.
Maybe it's not as much about the time as it is about the intimacy of it all.
And maybe it has less to do with the hour itself and more to do with what certain hours allow things to become. How the night allows routine to crystallize into.. ritual.

Rituals are strange things. Most of them barely exist outside repetition. Remove the return from them and they collapse into gestures so small they almost seem embarrassing.

A cigarette is absurd in isolation. Just paper. Tobacco. Fire. The ritual is what makes everything about it esoteric.
I think that is why people return to certain rituals long after they stop enjoying them. Eventually the repetition outlives the original reason for it. A structure built around longing. A way of revisiting something that no longer exists except through reenactment.

A cigarette is as alive as the ritual of smoking it. Both require our breath to sustain them.

The release of night. The heavy quietness. The path I've carved into this slice of time with every walk outside chipping away at the ground under me. Feet planted by the fence. Ice clinks when I set my glass down. The pause I take to gaze into the sky. The question I ask it. The answer I never get back. The click of the zippo. The muffled rustling and cracks of tiny tobacco shreds engulfed by the perpetual blowing hum of a flame. The sizzle as I draw in breath. The echo of a hollow whistle as the smoke leaves my body. The shape it makes in the falling light.

It's a macanudo inspirado mini, but I hold it the way you held the Marlboro. You wouldn't like these much. They're not as forgiving. There's no filter inbetween what you're doing and any reminder not to.

The reminder not to never helps much. There's a silent devastation in knowing why you do something. Not because it ever makes sense. But because you realize the knowing why does nothing to help you.

Actually, finding out why does something worse than not changing anything. It makes you believe it did for a while.

Most people think a life is this singular thing.
One uninterrupted line stretching from birth to death.
One possession.
Something we retain until circumstance, illness, or time takes it back.
Something you have until you don't, and then that's it.

But I don’t think that anymore.

I think we move through multiple lives within the same body.
Sometimes the distance between those lives becomes so great, the participants can no longer recognize one another.

I can remember things that happened to former versions of me.
But not from inside their point of view.
I can see them. But I can't get too close.
I look at them and see figures moving behind rain stained glass.

Beyond walls that are too tall for memory to climb. Beneath the surface my breath fogs up when I fix my lips to speak through it. Their movement dissolves into silhouette. Their light collapses slowly into a shadow.
A scene continues unfolding with unbearable intimacy just beyond reach, as though my life is still occurring somewhere else without me.

It even feels that way sometimes from my side of the wall. The moments in my life I can observe but no longer enter.

I used to try speaking to the people trapped behind those walls. The younger selves. The ones still standing in rooms I escaped from.

Eventually I stopped trying.

There was nothing I could do capable of reaching the other side. Not movement. Not screaming.

If there were words capable of making it through, I wonder what they would be.
If I could get them out, I wonder what they would change.
If there was a way to be noticed by that boy, I wonder if he would trust what he saw standing there.

Because I barely recognize him anymore.

And I think he would be afraid of what I became. He'd look at the man life hardened me into with the expression of someone seeing a.. ghost.

I know what that's like.

I think people misunderstand ghosts.
They imagine them as things that follow us. Apparitions. Visitations.
Something dead returning to the living.
But I think there are ghosts that remain perfectly still. And it is us who spend our lives orbiting them.

Like you.

You always felt difficult to hold onto.
Even when you were standing directly in front of me.
There were versions of you that appeared briefly.
Warm enough to rearrange me permanently.
Attentive enough to make me believe I had finally figured out how to keep you.
And then they would disappear again.
I think that is where the pursuit began.
Not after death. But so long before it, I knew of no life without it.
I think some part of me became organized around waiting for your return.
Monitoring atmospheres.
Listening to footsteps.
Learning how to detect love through fragments small enough that most people would never notice them.

A softened tone.
A hand lingering slightly longer than expected.
The rare nights you sat beside me long enough for me to stop preparing for your disappearance.

I knew how long I had left with you by measuring how much of your Marlboro was unsmoked.
Those moments became catastrophic in their importance to me.
I spent years trying to recreate them.
And eventually I began recognizing traces of you in people who had never met you.
Certain women.
Certain silence.
Volatility mistaken for meaning.
Warmth that arrived suddenly and vanished just as fast.
Sparks I would run after. Fantasizing the consumption of fire.
People I had to earn in pieces.
I chased all of them.

I think that’s why I smoke.
Smoke behaves the way you did.
It fills the room briefly.
Touches everything.
Becomes part of the air itself.
And disappears while you are still reaching for it.
Sometimes when the cigarette burns low enough and the room is quiet enough, I can almost convince myself I understand you.
Not logically.
A recognition that makes me feel like I could have known you for a moment.
Like brushing against the outline of a person in the dark.
Feeling the brief recoil of warm skin.
A breath landing on your shoulder.
Not knowing who is touching you.
Just knowing someone did.

When you died, people kept asking me what I planned to do with the ashes.
As though there existed an obvious answer to a question like that.
Scatter them somewhere meaningful.
Release you. Let you rest.

But they couldnt even begin to understand.

For most of my life, you existed as something intermittently reachable.
A voice I could hear through walls.
A figure disappearing down hallways.
An empty place in the driveway where your car should have been.
A warmth that could never be held in place long enough for me to trust it fully.

And now you exists inside an urn on my dresser.
Still.
Contained.
Reachable.
I know where you are at all times now.
And there.. is something that feels deeply unnatural about the comfort I take in that.
For the first time in my life, there is nowhere left for you to go.
And I know how terrible that sounds.
But I spent my whole life chasing your ghost.
I never accounted for what it would feel like to finally have you.

That was never part of the fantasy.
The pursuit was.
The movement.
The longing.
The fixation on something.
And the nothing I was willing to accept in the interim.
The constant orientation toward something unreachable.
I built myself around that pursuit so completely that I never stopped to consider what might remain once it ended.

The ritual. It's something we do. But we never think about what we would do if it ends.

And now that I have you, I don’t know what to do.
I don’t know where to place my thoughts anymore.
I don’t know where to direct that longing, now that there is nowhere left for it to go.
I used to think you were the piece that was missing.

Because I think I spent so many years chasing you that somewhere along the way the pursuit became me.
Or..
Or I became the pursuit.
And now that it’s over, I am no longer entirely certain I exist at all.

I still look for where I am.

I'm not behind the wall.
I'm done watching from the outside.
I turn around for once and walk away from the glass.

I'm not inside the smoke.
I put out the Macanudo and exhale at the ground.
I don’t need to see the shape it makes in the falling light any longer.

I love you.
But I was wrong about what you were.

I used to think you were the piece that was missing.
Now I realize what's missing is worse.
It's a piece of myself that I thought you were.. holding.