... And we kept the windows cracked, even on the coldest nights, because the smoke would rip our throats otherwise, and you would smoosh your cold nose against my warm chest and say, laughing, shivering, “We gotta quit. We really oughta quit.”

When we used to smoke I never bought my own cigarettes, which drove you crazy.
“You’re a smoker,” you would say. “Why don’t you buy your own cigarettes?”
“But why do I need to buy cigarettes if you always have them?”
“But I don’t have cigarettes when you smoke them.”
“But I don’t smoke when I’m not around you.”
“But you’re always around me. How do we solve this?”
“You have to quit.”
“Likely story, sweetheart.” You would suck long and hard on your cigarette and exhale in a straight white line. (We had learned so much from the movies.)

When we used to smoke we’d stay up till 3am drinking red wine and confessing everything, tipping over glasses and ripping seams, and I would wake up at 6am, having forgotten everything but the cigarettes, tens of them, thousands of them, stuck in my clothes and my hair, my tongue feeling as if it had grown a beard, and ashes on the floor, and ashes in the bed. You snored liked a giant.
“I’m never smoking again,” I told you when you woke.
“This is foul,” I told you as we made the bed. “Foul, foul.”
“I don't even like cigarettes,” I told you as we cleaned.
But the sun went down and it turned cold outside and I just wanted to join you, in the chair by the window where you sat, smoking.
“Can I?” I would ask, gesturing toward the pack.
“Of course. Have all you want.”
“Your lighter?”
And you would search the usual places – pockets, floor, underneath you in the chair – until I would find the lighter hidden in the cigarette pack. Your other bad habit.

When you quit, I didn’t believe you, because we were always quitting, every day. A joke to us. Everything was a joke to us. And I thought that I would miss it, mourn it, the taste or the smell or the destruction but I don’t really. We sleep with the windows closed on the coldest nights, and the windows open on the beautiful ones. Only I hide a pack in my glove compartment and smoke with my friends who haven’t quit yet, which is strange because YOU’RE the one who liked smoking not ME, and how is it that I’m the one who doesn’t want to give it up? And now my friends are quitting, one by one, choosing the smart thing, the right thing, the better thing, the harder thing instead of just falling, all the time, falling like it didn’t matter when it does matter, we know it matters, we know better than this. Don’t we? Shit. When we used to smoke, I could say “we.” Now I have to say “I.”

*a piece of sort-of fiction