Bad Habits

I'm sitting on my bed, breathing in my last cigarette and all I can do while sitting there is count the stars.

The poisonous, grey fog hangs in the stale air and, in those stars’ dim light, I watch it slowly disappear. Breathe it in, breathe it out. Each time it appears, a billowing puff of shocking white smoke, and then it slowly fades; I breathe in, out with a faster rhythm, watching. The more of it I exhale, the more there is of it to circulate through and infiltrate the dark, quiet room; I could fill this whole haven in the dank clouds, but I know that once this last cigarette’s smoke is gone, it’s gone. No longer will its dirty scent sting my nose or leech into my home – it will be gone.

I watch it linger in a haze, that cigarette pinched between my middle and forefinger is halfway gone, the ends’ embers still glowing, the only unnatural light in the room. For the first time since waking (it feels like hours ago now, but it must have only been a few minutes), I slowly turn my gaze to look at your form in the shadows. You've rolled away from me; your back, full of misshapen bumps of the vertebrae I love to secretly count, is curved as you're curled in on yourself in your sleep; even in deep slumber you can't open up around me. With my eyes, I carefully trace the constellations our tryst has left carved along your spine, longing, yet resisting, to graze them with my fingertips; you don't like it when I touch you too softly. Your eyes are closed, but I can still see their brilliance under your lightly fluttering eyelids, the unruly mop of dark curls flopped on my pillow are lank from your daily sweat, but all I can picture are those curls with my ocean blues. The glow from the stars highlight the bend in your nose, healed one too many times, and casts shadows on the hollows of your cheeks; you’re wasting away, and you can’t bring yourself to notice. You’re wasting away and yet you’re still the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

I take a hit to hold my breath through the pain that throbs in my chest. I close my eyes, waiting for the smoke to burn my throat just so I can cough it out again, hoping that the more I breathe it in, the longer it will stay in me, around me, the longer it will be part of me. You stir at the sound of my discomfort, rolling further away from me, and pulling the covers higher, tighter around you, a shield between you and the world. The urge to curl around you, to stroke your curls, to just touch you without your determined resistance is so strong, but I know from many nights of attempts to be close that it doesn’t ever end with butterfly kisses and whispered affections. Looking at you begins to hurt again, so I turn away too, to nurse my last cigarette, and accept that tonight, I’ll hold myself once more. But this time, maybe it won’t feel as lonely.

My cigarette is at the end; I can feel the numbness of that last cigarette’s near absence, and the subdued tone of finality it brings, hit me. I look down to the floor where I’ve been letting the ash crumble and fall. They scatter as they reach the ground to lying among the stains of previous regrets.

I take that last puff, not caring that it burns my lips, before I smother the coals on my dresser, letting the ashes leave a mark on its unfinished surface; I threw out our charred, crystal tray the first time you left.