Day 21: The Last Cigarette

I haven’t been able to smoke since.

For ten years, there was always a cigarette somewhere on my person. Tucked safely into my jeans, crammed into every coat pocket, forgotten at the bottom of every bag, it was as easy as breathing. A habit I never wanted to shake.

Then I met her, the prettiest girl I had ever seen in my life. She asked me for a lighter and I drunkenly blew smoke rings in the air. She grinned at that, and to spare my feelings pretended to be impressed, before blowing unholy amounts of smoke from her nostrils.

She was the first girl who let me smoke around her, and smoking went from being a lonely habit of mine, to something we did together. Every time I needed a break from studying, every time I was bored watching something I had seen a hundred times already, she was there beside me.

I was sure I loved her. Even the sight of her sprawled on the couch in her tracksuit, hungover and exhausted, with a cigarette between her fingers. She was beautiful in a way I can’t explain, as though everything she did had a glow to it. As though her very soul sparkled shades of yellow light.

But I didn’t sparkle or glow. Her heart didn’t beat faster when she saw me enter a room, and so knowing this, and knowing how I felt, she left.

Then I had a living room that smelt like her. The indistinguishable smell of nicotine, of hot smoke, that reminded me of her ashy hair, the taste of her mouth, the smell of her breathe. It’s warm and heavy in the air, and I wondered how I never noticed how obnoxious the smell was before. It clung to the room, to me as though the physical reminders of her – the shampoo in the bathroom, the sweater in the living room – weren’t enough in the way of heartbreak.

So I deep cleaned the room. Once, twice, a dozen times, each time finding cigarettes or lighters, more traces of her that I was desperate to be rid of. I scrubbed and scrubbed until there was nothing left.

Until the only trace of her was whenever I was bored, and would absent-mindedly reach a hand into my pocket searching for that tobacco flavoured release, and remember why there was nothing there.

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First of all I would like to thank Becca for letting me use her face for the photo. I'm not a smoker so couldn't get access to cigarettes, so I went to her asking for a photo of a lit cigarette or a "box of smokes" and she delivered with something better.

I think having her picture also changes the narrative a little, because it puts her in the story, which is kind of interesting, but also made me feel I stole her soul. 

Also, it made me realise the whole thing is very gender neutral. When writing I imagined the speaker as a man (for reasons I will explain below) but it's never explicitly said "oh yeah this is a man." And now that I reread it I think I might prefer it as an LGBT story? But death of the author states that it's really up to you to decide.

Anyway, I'm now going to explain what this is and why I wrote it and I'm going to shock you with some information three of you already know.

After 22 years of being alive, I am finally experiencing a real life crush. There is a boy who I very much like, he is my first ever crush and there is something very wonderful in that. Even though this boy is unavailable, I love feeling like this and there are some periods where, very cheesily, I am too smitten to focus on much else.

It was during one of those periods where I wrote this. I couldn't get him out of my head so I thought I would use an experience of him as a prompt. For once I let a particular memory of this person be my inspiration. But I don't write about real people, and I think it would be weird if I wrote a whole story about this person who I'm currently in a one sided relationship with, so I took like fifty steps back. I also deliberately switched things around to make the characters the opposite from the boy who gave me inspiration.

e.g The speaker in this story is most at home on the couch having a smoke, whereas, my real life crush is most at home on the tennis court 

Through one real memory I have I managed to create two characters who are very different from anyone I actually know personally.That's one reason why I like the characters in this story a lot more than I do characters in other stories I've written.

I've never written about love before, or romance, in this short format and I didn't expect my first piece to feel the way this one does. But that's the great thing about writing, you never really know what something will look like until it's done, and often you'll surprise yourself with what you can create.

Oh, I also wrote this on day 9 but held back from posting for a really long time because I was afraid he would find this and just know it's about him. But now, I realise that is kind of stupid because

1) I don't have him on instagram
2) I don't think he cares about me enough to read an entire blog post devoted to him
3) I think pretending that my crush plays tennis will have thrown him off
4) Even if by some miracle he would have found this, and correctly assumed that this is in fact about him, I don't think it's that big of a deal. He is my first crush, and all that really means is that I care about him and he does kind of 'glow' in my eyes. And I know if anyone thought of me like that it would make me melt.

This was Day 21 of my NaNoWriMo project where I am writing a new short story every day in November! Originally all of these were posted to instagram, but the 300 word limit was a little confining so I've come here to post everything I've written and a little bit more!