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.