Snow

12 | cigarettes burn slowly when you're lonely

❝i got boulders on my shoulders, collar bones about to crack. there is very little left of me,
and it's never coming back.❞

❘❘

CIGARETTES ALWAYS BURN SLOWER WHEN YOU'RE ALONE. I'd always believed they were a social clashing—a quiet company that helped strike up conversation with strangers.

But the bathroom on the 5th floor is empty. I'm alone.

I take a drag of the fucking Newport I stole from Julian. Even if the cigarette burns slowly, it doesn't stop my hand from trembling. A warm breeze twists through the cracked window; it lifts my hair, sending it fluttering around me in a tornado of tangled strands and wasted ashes.

It's too warm to be September, and I'm too high to be in class.

The tail-end of the summer caught up to me too fast. As the lingering high from Julian's apartment fades with each lonely moment, the heat in my chest begins to fracture into ice. My gaze surrenders lazily, dropping to the solution beside me.

A tiny, tiny, tiny pocket at the top of my backpack hides and holds the tiny, tiny, tiny bags of white powder.

Smoke billows from my lips as I toy with the zipper. I should be in my lecture about law and ethics in journalism, but I can't quite find it in me to care about it like I did three months ago.

I can't find it in me to care about anything.

It's too hot. I rub a hand up my face to slide the sweat into my hairline. The messy bun at the top of my head is limp; my heart is sinking with defeat.

It's never come easy to me, but mamá used to lecture us on the importance of an educación—an educación that she and papá didn't get.

So then the lectures became rants, and then the rants became full, frustrating orders to go to school, to find opportunity, to get a good job, to become something. Anything.

That was always the problem.

I wanted to be nothing. Nada.

Weightless in a summer storm, drifting with whatever came my way, and free of anything that could drag me down.

Infinite, invincible, indestructible.

Coasting along a cocaine high.

I scoot further onto the vent, tuck my legs under me; I swivel to face the window, blowing hot smoke out into the hot, hot, hot evening.

My phone vibrates, but my fingers are curled beneath the window frame. With my cigarette still dangling from my left hand, I push the window up higher and higher—until the tiny bathroom is only an ocean of stale, summer air...until I'm drowning in the taste of heavy, hazy memories.

My eyes flutter closed, desperate to untie the knot in my chest—that tight feeling, that stifling pressure, that reminder of a million mistakes.

Things change. People change.

Nada es para siempre.

I need to move on, but so does Enzo.

When I open my eyes, I'm gazing down five stories to the bottom of the city. Rooftops, sidewalks, cars. I could slide out the window and just...jump...fall.

Then every call would go to voicemail para siempre.

Another vibration shakes my leg, and when I blink, I'm holding the phone in my palm.