The day Remy quit smoking I smoked his last cigarette. He sat across from me, pale blue eyes glowing like phosphorescence in the dying day.
Could I describe it? He asked, his hands shaky. He was a mere shadow of the statue he'd become in my eyes. Finally admitting that it was time to move on.
It feels... It feels like trying to breathe in a volcano.
Finally succumbing to all the fire sweeping around, tunneling through
sneaking into the crevices of my body...
I paused to look at him. He was looking at the smoke, touching it with his fingertips, tracing the wrinkles of his addiction in the cool face of nighttime.
Which is why I never quit. He left that night, leaving an impression of himself, the cylinder of cigarette ash like snakeskin on the pavement. He left that night and unknowingly offered me a piece of himself that no longer served him, the habit that had made a home somewhere northeast of his heart and had promised him the ability to hold fire between his fingertips.
After Remy was gone, I wandered about for weeks in a daze. Wondering, like a broken ballerina, when I would regain my rhythm, my grace, my zeal. It came slowly. Unraveling my depression with a gentle tug at one of the loose ends, pulling through the stitches until all I was left with was a lap full of sad yarn.
The night times were my safe haven. The lost souls all gathered to share, like offerings of peace, the pills like confetti, pink and red, blue and white... All a silent promise to be easier than sobriety. When the morning would break, the sweaty babbling phantoms would scatter into the street like so many cockroaches and I would sit, bathing in the melted butter sun, the fire between my thumb and forefinger tasting like
Remy's smile. His booming laugh.
The crinkles next to his eyes
and the subtle ache that he left inside me,
when he'd finally remembered how to love himself
and forgot to teach me.
