He smoked a lot. I told him it would kill him.
He looked me dead in the eye and told me we were all dying anyway, he was just speeding up the process.
I asked why he'd want to.
He told me living was hard, almost like a chore.
I couldn't argue with that. I never brought it up again after that. I just watched him as he took a long drag, and I watched him as he blew out the smoke.
After we made love, though I'm not sure I could even call it that, he would always have a cigarette.
He told me there were two things he was addicted to: his cigarettes and me.
It made me glad, because it was something I could hold onto. Something that contained an unspoken, indirect promise.
He told me he was too addicted to his cigarettes to part with them before he died, and I hoped he was that addicted to me too.
He was fucked up, in a lot of ways. He'd had a rough life, and there were days when I could see just how tired he was of it all. He used to take harder drugs to escape it, but he quit after he nearly overdosed, and now he only smoked.
I was terrified he'd leave me. That one day I'd wake up, and he wouldn't be lying next to me, sitting up in bed and staring at the ceiling with a nicotine stick hanging from his mouth. He'd pack up his stuff, and be gone. Or maybe one day I'd wake up, and he'd lie next to me, but he wouldn't wake up. Both were equally frightening.
He was my first love. I'd found him at a young, vulnerable age. I was only sixteen. He was twenty five. I was a minor, and he could've been arrested for any kind of affiliation with me. But he pursued me anyway, and then he fucked me. He brought me into a world of sex, drugs, and money, and I didn't want to leave. It slowly became my world too, consuming me as I eagerly let it. He'd taken my hand and pulled me down, farther from salvation and closer to damnation.
But I was going down with him, so I didn't mind too much.
When my mother found out, she slapped me so hard I was on the floor before I could blink. Furious tears leaking from her pale blue eyes, she didn't stop hitting me. She kicked me, anywhere she could. My face, my stomach, my legs. It didn't matter.
She told me she'd disown me, kick me out onto the street if I didn't stop seeing him. But I didn't care. I couldn't, wouldn't, leave him.
Still can't and won't.
How do you let go of a first love? You don't.
A first love as enigmatic as him? Someone you could spend eternity with, yet never truly understand?
Maybe there was too much of him to understand. Too much personality? Too much sadness? Too much torment?
And maybe you didn't really want to understand. Maybe the mystery was what made you stay.
He had me questioning everything.
He never said it, but he loved me too. And that one thing, I never questioned.
When we had sex, he took me to another place. I place I hadn't even known existed.
Entangled in his body, with one of his hands tugging my hair and the other fondling my breast while he was completely pressed into me, I found my nirvana. My peace. My heaven.
And after the sex, when we lie together, with me swirling patterns on his bare chest with my fingers, he'd smoke another cigarette.
Cigarettes after sex.
That was his routine, the only thing that kept him sane, that made sense in his chaotic life. He clung to it the way I clung to him.
I only clung, though, because he loved me. And I knew he left all the things he loved. His family, his job; he gave them all up as he immersed himself further into a volatile world. And if he left them, he could just as easily leave me.
I expressed my worry, at night, sometimes. When my stomach was so knotted with the thought of him not next to me that I couldn't stand it, and I asked:
"Will you leave me?"
His thick voice didn't miss a beat before responding, "Eventually, I'll have to."
I choked up a bit. Speaking through the lump in my throat, I pressed on, "When?"
He shrugged. "Who can know?" He looked at me then, long and hard. "But know one thing, baby. I'll love you. I'll love you forever. I'll love you a day past forever. I'll never stop. That's what matters."
His words comforted me slightly, though the initial worry hadn't faded. I desperately tried to find some solace in his words, some kind of guarantee. But I found none, and that scared me. Sure, he'd love me. But if he wasn't with me, what would that matter?
I didn't think too much about it. I accepted the answer, and moved on. I didn't truly think he'd leave, not anytime too soon anyway.
I was wrong about that.
