Tonight I sat on my porch in the dry heat, a cigarette between my lips, perched on a shelf of teeth. With each inhale I thought of you. I remembered the night, where you smoked in front of me, as means to impress me. We had all been drinking, tossing back shots with a chorus of laughter. The booze had been sticky and sweet, reeking of cheap but we were in the midsts of a reckless adolescence and it filled my greedy mouth like a neater nectar. That was the first time you kissed me, I was drunk as were you. You tasted like inexperience and debauchery, with chapped lips, you surprised me then.
I recalled the time you told me about the time you swore to your father that you would never smoke, your mother and he had both smoked once upon a time, she stopped during her pregnancy but he never quit. I thought back to the day I found that you now smoked regularly. A lot of collegians do, so perhaps it is just a ploy of conformity, anything for popularity, anything for the normality you always seemed to seek. But I can't help but to think it's because of me. I tainted your lips that night, just as I tainted your sheets months later.
I imagined you telling me that the nicotine fix you now crave began as a way to pretend that I was close to you still. An oral fixation due to obsession, but I don't think that's true and I don't want it to be as much as I hope that it is.
As I smoked tonight, my exhaled smoked spelled out the letters of your name. I popped the cap of my glass bottle of diet coke, and during a wry smirk caused by thoughts of pretty girls. My head began to ache and the thickening air around me became quickly and quietly too heated. I wanted to remove my hoodie, the pink one you complemented me on before I left for Chicago.
That last memory shook me, how much of me was smeared with you?
I gazed to my feet, they were clad in one of the many pairs of ballet styled flats that I bought to ensure that I would not beat your height.
I slid my tongue across the lips that you used to hit with yours on the regular basis that I miss, I tasted a sickening saccharine flavor and remembered applying the gloss that you love.
You defiled my body,
And tainted my mind,
You coursed through my being,
Swimming in my veins
I tore apart my flesh and bled you out every night,
The splatter staining my existence.
