"Smoking kills but so does life, which death has a sweeter taste on the tongue?"
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When an avid smoker and an overly considerate girl worlds collide, someone is bound to get burned.
Published (Feb, 2019)
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It didn't take me very long to learn that Harry was the type of person who had two sides to his story.
On one hand, he could be incredibly quiet, aloof, someone who you'd never recognized breathed your air unless he inhaled directly in front of you. In this same way, he could be cold, afraid of everything around him, and so unbearably angry at any and everything.
Yet, in the snap of a hand, he'd show the other version of his events.
In this side, he was quite the sputtering mess. He was an individual who's first instinct would be to look at the ground when he spoke. He'd be a twister of hands, a blusher, someone who's voice sounded as if it could be lost with the wind if he allowed it to, and someone who never seemed to get angry.
After I told Harry where I lived, he recognized it to be a solid 30 minute walk, at worst, and that narrowed it down to either trodding the distance or calling an Uber.
Considering the circumstance, I abandoned the latter.
As we walked, where there wasn't silence, there was conversation, and even though it was often started by me, more often than not, it was ended by Harry.
I never once interrupted him. I never once shrug him off because I understood the rarity of Harry speaking about things that he cared for. I let him speak, the storm in his eyes disappearing as he seemed to relax more and more.
I knew if this side of him were chased away, it would most likely never come back, so I took caution.
"Your class...." I trailed off as he eventually finished up a story. "Do you go often?"
It had been on my mind for a while.
He seemed to pale a bit. "Uh my class?" His eyes fell to the floor. "Uh yes I go everyday. In last period."
That guilty feeling rushed into me as I thought about how quick I was to misjudge him.
"Do you like it very much?"
"Well," he licked his lips. "For a really long time, I had been avoiding it because I thought of it as... bad for me. I guess I was scared about the person I would become if I stayed there."
He turned to me. "Do you ever feel that way? Like.. Do you ever get that feeling that as good as something may be for you, it can also be really bad?"
I swallowed. "I do."
"So what do you do about it then?" He wondered. "Do you abandon what makes you scared or do you chance it?"
I thought about his question.
"There's a quote that I think about sometimes," I replied shortly after. "It goes- our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt." I looked down. "I think about that quote, and I realize that fear will always try to stop us from doing what's right for us. That doesn't mean you should give up. It just means you have another reason to try harder."
