ashes to ashes
I don’t like this. But I feel like I have to post it because I’ve been writing too much poetry recently and the ‘My Writing’ tab of this poor website has been going a bit stale. There’s a moment near the end where the anonymous ‘you’ (whose identity you can probably guess. lol) tells me that he never took up smoking properly. I didn’t believe him at the time but as it turns out, he seriously wasn’t lying. I know this because his organs were donated. His clean lungs saved somebody’s life. He was not a smoker and he told me the truth
I only ever saw you smoke one cigarette. You were eleven and I was twelve and you were still my height somehow, still red crocs and scrounging fingers in the dirt track behind my house. There was, you kept saying, a man here before, lighting up. He might’ve dropped one. Or left one unfinished. A man here before. I was twelve and I still held my breath when I passed smokers on the street. You were eleven and you were on your knees in the dirt searching for the burnt end of something terrible. Our versions of rebellion were back garden campfires and sneaking home from the co-op in the dark, but there you were pushing hair out of your eyes with dusty palms, blue shirt sweat-stuck to your shoulder blades, we can just wash the smell off in the river anyway. I remember staring at you while you couldn’t see me and wondering what you’d look like as a grown-up. Whether you already were one and I just hadn’t quite noticed the years curling past.
I kept asking are you sure and you kept huffing like you were the older one. You straightened up and your shins were all cracked and red with the imprint of stones in the path; I wanted so badly to want you. Maybe I just did. Your top lip was glistening a little and I took a step backwards because I almost lifted my thumb to wipe it dry and you — grown-up you, you in the dirt for the cigarette — would’ve hated that. Anything?
Not yet. But I swear I saw him drop one. And then you were kicking rocks aside, elbowing nettles out the way and watching for my reaction in your periphery because you knew I’d be impressed. You weren’t trying to impress me specifically and I knew that, even then, but I could still put the face on and wish for it. Really you just wanted to be something bigger and stronger than eleven years old. Nettle wrangler, cigarette smoker. I could see it in the angle of your grin. We were spying on the man out of the barn window, the whites of your eyes double-shining because of the panes of glass between us and him. I remember watching the way you brought index and middle up to your mouth just the way he was doing it. Adjusting so that your knuckles were just crooked enough, thumbing the backs of your nail-bitten fingers to knock away invisible ash. Oh, God. I remember your hands.
Then in real time you sucked in a hard breath and held something up to me like it was anything more than rolled up paper and damp tobacco, all orange apart from the inch-long strip of off-white that the man hadn’t bothered to stick around for. In my head he was a man, but we were so young. Anyone with a pack of Marlboros was older than the universe. Even the lonely kid out the window with the Spiderman lighter that shone in the sun. Found it, you said, so breathless, so proud of the thing in the air between us that for the first time in our lives I couldn’t quite understand you. And anyway, the cigarette was out of focus. Your eyes were very blue.
You were shaking a little and I couldn’t understand that either, and more than anything I wanted to grab a handful of your hair and say what are you doing, who are you, why is this so important to you and not to me. When did you grow up. Where was I. But it was never like that for us. We weren’t the type to say real things out loud. In the end I just said get up, which felt close enough, and then I pulled you upright by the hood of your jacket for the fun of it because it was the closest I could get to touching you without having to come clean about it.
We had that lighter with us and it was all a little ridiculous in the end, hopping the fence and crouching low behind the cowparsley so that our parents wouldn’t see us even if they walked right by. The device in question was the best we could do as not-even-teenagers, one of those long-necked safety lighters that you only ever use for birthday candles and kindling in the hearth. Better than matches, you’d said, shrugging, and I wasn’t even sure if you were right because technically matches would be cooler but I trusted you and the eaves were creaking with my mum’s footsteps so I just shoved the thing into my jeans pocket and scurried out of the kitchen behind you. I drew it out now, clicked it until it sparked, watched the flare of orange climb your features like a sunrise. Brand-new shadows flickered across your face in soft sfumato, sharp relief — it lit you up. I lit you up. Your first ever cigarette and there I was holding the flame.
We didn’t know the rules — the light-and-drag technique, the filter between your lips like a trapped limb — so you just held the burnt end to the lighter until it was actually on fire and then blew it out like incense. The cowparsley kept tickling the back of my neck; your elbows were pocked with nettle stings. Everything in the world was still the green of childhood except this, it, you. I don’t remember what the sky was doing but I’ll call it overcast, call it dusk-blue clouds banding together above your hair and your hands and your furrowed brow as you held the cigarette to your mouth and inhaled. Soft like an accordion until the leaves fizzled — smouldering amber, dirt beneath your nails, that mark on your cheek. I wanted to touch you, your forehead, your wrists, wanted to press whatever I could to your pulse and feel for a shift in the beating heart of you. Some first-cigarette alteration. Bigger muscles. Darker lungs.
But I never touched so you never changed, and I was gripping the lighter so tight that the flame was still dancing between us as you took the slow deep breath. Time froze in that way it sometimes does. You were holding the cigarette like you’d been taught to half an hour ago by the boy-man in the window and I was picturing you with a split lip and bruised knuckles and a leather jacket and I didn’t know why. Really you were a blonde boy in a blue t-shirt. Eleven years old and breathing in.
And then time came unstuck and you were pitching forward, this funny noise caught in your throat until it broke free in a fit of coughing that was so strangely relieving I almost dropped the lighter on you. It wasn’t smooth and it wasn’t grown up and your hands were still the same size as mine, I remember it so well, how I took the cigarette from you so you could brace yourself against the ground to suck in the good air and for a moment our fingers were just — the same. Tangled and desperate. Identical. Warm. It’s so bad, you managed, finally, still trying to spit the taste out between sentences. How does anyone get addicted to that. What.
I just stared at the yellowing filter and winced at the smoker smell. I don’t know. I wanted to say something profound but I was a little too young to know what that sounded like; my best word for the world was scintillating and my only word for love was you.
I saw you smoke that one cigarette and it wasn’t even smoking, wasn’t even a full cigarette, it was a single fractured inhale that made you choke so hard it turned us kids again and a wilted half-burnt treasure of the nettles which only really counted because you wanted it to.
Four years later I hugged you goodbye at a party and your coat smelled like an ashtray. You actually a smoker now? It was our first time seeing each other in too many months and the way you looked at me in the weird light I could tell we were both thinking about that day by the cowparsley. Your eyes were still blue and your nails were still bitten. You smelled like smoke and your shirt was grey. Not, like, really. No. Sometimes I just don’t know what else to do with my hands.
Five years later I stood at the front of a very big room and touched the box with your ashes in it. I don’t know why. Your body had been burned down like a cigarette. I didn’t know what else to do with my hands.
