(Sweet Jane Blows Her Fags) Looking the Other Way

By Julian E. Stanton ‘08 (this is not a real person I checked)

She deeply inhaled her cigarette, but without any form of elegance – no slow, soothing inhalations nor sharp jawline traced with delicate fingers. Frankly, she smoked in total decadence, defying the one of the primary reasons to smoke in the first place, he thought to himself. To make someone seem to operate with greater finesse than without.
She, on the other hand, gripped her cigarette like a joint; a precious joint made with the remains of last week’s purchase. It was embarrassing for him to watch, almost as though he were witnessing some lewd act but couldn’t turn away. Not with those hard eyes of hers. Her eyes gripped him like the hold on her cigarette. Why couldn’t she blow that fag the way Grace Kelly did? he asked himself. But the answer was quite simple: this woman before him was no Grace Kelly.
His eyes followed the seductive trail of smoke at the end, how it mixed with the formless disaster trailing from her mouth and spreading like a plague through the rest of the room. Her lips defiantly curled out as they reached for that cigarette giving a demonic smile or a deformed pout. He couldn’t discern the difference.
Eventually she noticed him.
At first, his gaze made her feel naked, but eventually this initial reaction precipitated to unbridled (and coincidentally, unfounded) hatred towards him, before dissipating to vague apathy or melancholy. It was difficult to tell the difference anymore.
Even though she could breathe hard while having sex, it was the cigarette that taught her how to really breathe – to suck in that air as though it were her final breath and exhaling like it would rid her of the toxins in her lungs that she had so diligently procured.
The smoke billowed in her lungs like the faded ocean wave drawn violently back to the sea. She remembered her eight-year-old self unsuccessfully chasing a toy that she dropped at the shore. The ocean stole it from her before she could retrieve it; she remembered seeing it float off in the distance. How she hated the ocean’s muted laughter. And with that thought, she deeply exhaled. The wave crashed against the shore once again.
She glanced over at him again, sitting so pathetically on that couch with that foolish gaze. Did she want to kiss him or slap him? She knew that she loved him but wasn’t quite sure if she liked him. She would give until the rest of the cigarette to decide.
Sometimes she liked to see how much ash could accumulate on the cigarette before gravity got the best of her. Sensibility usually won out and she would haphazardly extend her arm – and at times she might extend the effort to use her torso – to that pithy little tin on the coffee table before her. She was weary of ashes on the lap. The ashes were stupidly metaphorical to her, the cliched acknowledgment of life passing her by and left in a tray to be disposed in the rubbish bin. She clung to that analogy, though, because it made the ignition of the next cigarette more rewarding. Her personal catharsis for $3.99 a pack or whatever they were going for those days.
He desperately wanted teach her how to properly smoke a cigarette, but feared that he would seem too patronizing. He hated following her demented social code yet loved her too much to deny it. If she asked, he gladly would have been her ashtray. She could use his palm, his forearm, his face. It didn’t matter. What he really wished he could be was her cigarette – that she would evade as many social situations and obligations to be with him as she does for her precious fag: when she wakes up, waits for her bus, takes breaks from her work. Always. That she would save her breath as she did with her smoke and how she smoked it like it was her last breath. Then cling to him like he was her only lover, the way she did with that goddamn object.
Not that he really knew how to smoke cigarettes anyway. He simply knew how ought not to smoke them. He sighed. Sometimes it hurt him how much he loved her. And her cold, blank stare froze him until his body cracked. All he could do was turn away and forget. Mesmerize himself with the trail of smoke silhouetted by the penetrating sunlight.
Her cigarette was at its withering end. She reluctantly snubbed it out and sorrowfully watched its final embers linger. Pretending to rub her nose, she casually – though tactically – raised her left hand. But who was she kidding? She wanted one final whiff of that repulsive scent. Like the lingering smell on a pillow of a lost lover. Then she remembered that her lover was sitting seven feet away, defeated. Was it I who defeated him? she wondered to herself. There was a time when she would have taken a great pleasure in such an accomplishment. To call this an accomplishment, though, would be calling a shit after lunch an accomplishment as well. Thoughtless, inevitable, and predictable in its methodology and outcome. Because taking a shit really requires a method. Crushing his ego was even easier.
No, he had it all wrong. She did look at him like her cigarettes, especially the one lying in the tray. With a pang of regret and soft nostalgia.
What more can be said? She lit another to avoid the questions that continued to haunt her. Or maybe to start another one of her silly metaphorical existences. And he looked out the window, trying to capture the seemingly recent memory of what it is like to be loved. The smoke trailed out and was swallowed by the wind.