The danger of ephemerality

Mummy, I never told you this before, but I was the one who stole your cigarettes.

Yes, me, your fruitful little gent who used to steal them as a deterrent for your compulsive habit. It’s funny, I can still vividly picture myself taking them captive and hiding them around the house as if it were yesterday. I was little Robin Hood, while your body was the peasantry and your response was the amalgamation of King Richard, his aristocracy and obviously the Sheriff.

Do you remember how annoyed you’d get? Especially when we went to France that one time. I hid them in the most masterful locations, i’d have you running around like a headless chicken. You would come to me with steam ejecting from your ears and nose and beg for them back; needless to say, I had won, even though I gave them back.

Not now though. My once ambivalent opinion on my own virtuosity has become complete certainty. Now, i’ve lost… dignity… self respect… but most empirically, my moral chastity.

Oh how I wish we could return to those ephemeral times of the past, where I was serving the greater good, looking out for you! But I grew up. I entered adolescence, and the calm, collected, young gent turned into a mischievous, knifing, even scandalous teenager. No longer taking your fags for the loving welfare of his mother, but deviously stealing them, for the sanctity of his nonchalant behaviour, in hopes of peer appraisal.

I would wait until you had gone to bed, then creep and lurk, like a villain in the night. I would approach the antique wooden cabinet safeguarding these precious items, and trying not to make a sound, take out a packet of Marlboro Golds. I would smoke one of them outside trying not to regurgitate my lungs out. Then I pocketed the packet, safe in the knowledge that I had successfully boosted my egotistical reputation at school.

It wasn’t long until I realised that’s where you kept the booze too. Spirits of all kinds. Liquer, Vodka and the prized Bombay Saphire I recall you talking of. That too was an easy steal, in somewhere that is supposed to be safe. There was a space for a padlock on the cabinet, but why would you need it? I filled a leather coated hip flask with liquer, spilling half of it down the side and staining it. I kept it by my bed, for special occasions.

But it wasn’t just you. Do you remember your friend Ruth who’s sadly passed now? Well, when we stayed with her, I stole her vape. Yes. That one. It didn’t go missing… I had brought it to school, and passed it around the changing rooms in the hopes that with every toke I was attaining a higher status quo.

Unbeknownst to me, it was myself who I was stabbing in the back, hoisting myself in one great big moral petard. You too, of course, but i’m talking of my morality; I was stealing. STEALING! Yet, after every lesson you had so graciously bestowed upon us: that ‘manners maketh man’ and the decorum that you embedded into our household, I stole. Maybe it’s telling of man as a collective, but even so, that begs no grounds for my shameful behaviour. It was you who I looked up to. And yet it was you who I showed the least respect to.

In writing this, I can only hope to amend the un-mendable, conceding the wrong-doings of my adolescence and reinforce upon myself those true, humane morals you taught me; those that really make up one as a righteous person. As much as I’d love to say I was your wonder-boy, your man of the house, it would be a lie. I can only say I’m sorry, and hope that is enough to rectify what I once did.

I love you Mummy, and I’m sorry. I hope you can forgive my foolish behaviour