How were we born into this mess?

Tiny bits of tobacco have made their home scattered across my bed, lap, keyboard. Essentially nothing within a three-foot radius is immune to the loose tobacco. Your bad habits slowly became mine too as my heart traversed all the miles between us like a tumbleweed.

I started smoking your favorite cigarettes to make you seem more real when you felt physically intangible. If I could taste you, you weren’t just an apparition of a chilly backyard acoustic show and a month of anticipation that culminated in a tender night spent in a hotel room where everything felt warm and full the only time that winter. If I could taste you, you weren’t just a voice, frequent messages sent via some sort of electronic medium, and a void in my bed that felt too cold and too big all winter long. Blake Schwarzenbach from Jawbreaker was right when he asserted that it gets loneliest at night in “ Kiss The Bottle.” You’d tell me how much you wanted to be there to keep me warm while I slept but that didn’t happen until things fell apart leaving me dropping these tiny bits of tobacco everywhere as I clumsily go about the slow rolling mechanics and the formation of saliva seals.

I do this alone in my bedroom because the night that you infiltrated my heart, you infiltrated my lungs as well. What made me decide to brave the two hundred some miles between our lives was standing nestled together, shivering in that alley a block away from your campus. Something about our sporadic kissing and taking alternate drags off of your cigarette, the last one, in an effort to keep a little warm charmed me in a way I didn’t understand then and still don’t now despite the fact that hindsight is supposed to be a perfect 20/20. From then on, cigarettes were your placeholder, filling the gaps in the empty days until I’d see you again.

I do this alone in my bedroom at three o’clock in the morning because I’ve barely got the hang of it and it’s still too messy of a process to be done in public. It’ll likely always be too messy of a process to be done in public. My mother always tells me, “It’s a good thing I didn’t name you Grace because you don’t have any.” I can’t say that she’s really all that wrong. I wonder when you learned this. Was it just from my sheer clumsiness that leads to my shins being forever bruised? When I called you drunk on the way home from an awkward party and told you I missed you and I was sorry if I was being annoying, I just missed you so much and I kissed the bottle when I should have been kissing you? Was it just from knowing me?

I do this alone in my bedroom at three o’clock on a Monday morning because I am approaching the end of the free packs having handed half of them out under the guise of smoking but not being a smoker. I don’t think this label fits so well anymore these days. Though I’d lean on you sometimes, just to see if you were still there emotionally, I smoked to feel you physically when you weren’t there and now that the distance has quadrupled, my wallet can’t handle you if you come in a pack. So three dollars and some assembly required it is.

I do this alone in my bedroom at three o’clock in on a Monday blinking back tears because anything with a filter tastes like a bone dry version of your mouth. At a thousand miles away and barely talking, you’re reduced from the hand I thought I needed to hold in order to conquer the world to a black cloud in my lungs. I swear I’ll get you out of there someday, somehow. I’ll quit when I stop loving you or when I stop listening to the same Jawbreaker song on repeat thinking about how I painted you a prettier picture, baby. Or maybe I could quit if you came home and we tried to be like we were that fall: a little young and a little dumb with our vices keeping us warm when we couldn’t fully be there for each other.

And Remember To Have Your Hopeless Self Spayed Or Neutered

The blue television glow washes over real life as you’re held down, nose plugged to have the confirmation of your present status force fed to you. Left upset and confused, you sit rubbing your sore cheeks where the fingers dug in to pry your jaws apart so that you could ingest (but certainly not willingly accept) this all.

Though you can’t seem to comprehend why anyone would waste their time standing for hours on a southern California sidewalk in a stupid t-shirt waiting for the chance to wear a nametag and jump up and down like an idiot, the glare of stage lights seems all too familiar as does the embrace of the washed up former improv show host now in the gameshow business as the successor of a man so old he likely reeked of formaldehyde as others are being called down to talk of wristwatches and picnic baskets. They rattle off numbers not sure whether to trust the screaming crowd or to follow their guts. And if they follow their guts, the slightly rotund bespectacled host finds them quite maverick for some unknown reason.

Once they get this wristwatch and picnic basket right (and will you look at these awkward first prizes) their next task is to make sure a little plastic guy doesn’t step off a cliff or to drop a hockey puck down a maze for what they hope is a new car but is usually just fiber tablets and some ugly plates or something. This accumulation of junk is all in anticipation for what these people hope will be the big one. Though first they must spin the wheel that is the biggest game of chance in all of this. Sure it’s possible to be brilliant at guessing games but nothing short of telekinesis will guarantee that this wheel will spin and stop in the spinner’s favor.
Now for the successful spinners. What is this next stage, the big show? Can you call it that? It’s just more guessing games and potentially shitty prizes.

This, my dear friend, is where you come in. Showcase number one. You’re a big deal because it feels like the person bidding went through a lot to get to you. But let’s face it, there’s nothing too outrageously special about you in comparison to showcase number two over there. You’re a brown velour couch in such an unattractive model that you should likely be called “the davenport” should you ever actually reside in one’s home and a blue tandem bike. Congratulations, you probably have the words Eagle Twin Cruiser tattooed on you somewhere or perhaps Stanley Fine Furniture.

As this couch and bike, you don’t feel like so much of a prize next to showcase number two, it’s a motherfucking trip to Hawaii. It’s all sunshine and gorgeous scenery while you are the textbook definition of awkward, especially if you happen to come with a lifetime supply of laundry detergent this week.
So of course you’re going to be passed upon by the one with the best wheel luck. This act will be much to their competitor’s dismay. And this competitor will feign enthusiasm as he bids upon you because you’re still better than walking away from this supposedly climactic moment empty handed.

There is a chance that both your bidder or his competitor will win both you and that trip to Hawaii. Should that happen, you’ll likely be shoved into the basement and forgotten until those couple days of paradise are over and then you’ll occasionally be a comfy place to rest one’s head.

Otherwise, it’s a 50/50 shot you’ll walk away the victorious showcase with the less than triumphant television quasi gambler. You’re still comfortable and quirky in your composition yet you’ll never quite be that once in a lifetime opportunity he was hoping for.

So you sit and ponder values and the tragicomic that this system of them seems to create and you can’t help but wonder if we can all be more than four days on the beach or a shitty couch and impractical bike if this system is reevaluated.