I lie because I don’t want my insurance rates to go up, because he has my family history right in front of him where it says both my parents died of lung cancer. Even if he’s too polite to say it, he’ll make a little mark on my file and it will feel like he’s drawing an X over my entire life.
Then I’ll have to tell him it was for a girl, because of course it was.
She smoked every night with her two friends outside my dorm. I’d never been so jealous of a cigarette in my life, so envious of ash, to glow from the touch of her lips, to fall at her feet and be completely consumed. I bought a pack at the gas station, the same kind she smoked, so I could show up one night and say, What are the odds?! and mean What are the odds someone like you could love someone like me?
I’d have to tell the doctor we hit it off, that she had a boyfriend but he was a dick and her friends hated him. They asked me, What the hell is wrong with men? and I said, We’re terrible. Waste of your time. You should probably all become lesbians. She was the only one of the three who didn’t eventually take my advice.
I’d have to admit how I went back to my room that night and smelled my pungent fingers and thought, If I could get a girl like that, even once, I’d die happy.
I addicted myself to her and nicotine a little more with each nightly smoke session. She told me she wondered if her boyfriend was gay because he didn’t seem to want to touch her and I said, “He might be going through something,” but thought He has to be. He fucking has to be.
When they eventually broke up, she and I got drunk in her room. I didn’t make a move because it seemed like trying to kiss the moon, so when she leaned in and put her lips on mine it momentarily broke the tides of my mind. She fell asleep later that night still fully-clothed wearing my baseball cap. I tiptoed out of the room with lipstick on my cheek and lunar dust on my fingertips.
We dated for a week before my kidneys failed. I tried to push her away but she wouldn’t go. I sobbed like a child that night and we tried to make love but she was a virgin and she kept tensing up, so I made cookies in the communal kitchen and we watched cartoons. I decided some things were better than sex but found out a few days later I was wrong.
Even before it got bad, it felt like a crime to sully her body with mine. Still, she’d grab the muscles on the back of my arms in bed and tell me, It’s a good thing you’re sick. A healthy version would kill me. I’d think, You fool. You glorious, beautiful fool.
Even the surgeries and treatments didn’t change her mind, not the stitches or blood, not the tubes they put in my chest with the plastic ends I’d tape together so they wouldn’t click during sex.
At my most hideous, she made me feel beautiful.
It would bury me to look the doctor in the eye and tell him how she stayed through a year of dialysis, that somehow, impossibly, I was less alone during that frightful period than at any other point in my life.
Because then I’d have to tell him how I fucked it up.
Dying turned out to be easier than living. I became an expert at the first and forgot how to do the second. I didn’t know how to be a person anymore, to take the myopic, self-importance of daily life seriously. She started working at a bookstore, a far cry from her pre-graduation dreams. We were adults in waiting, her with her English degree, me with my scars, neither of us ready to rejoin the world.
She ended things four years in. It was the right decision. I wish I could meet you ten years from now, she told me when she left. The implication being we’d have our lives together.
I’d have to tell the doctor she was wrong. It would take longer for me. I’d fall in another pit as soon as I’d crawled my way out of that one. She had a life, an adventure. She made beautiful things. No one was less surprised than I was. I felt the vinegared pride that comes with watching someone you deeply admire outgrow you.
I survived. It was the only thing I was really good at.
I quit smoking shortly after the breakup. Couldn’t stand the smell. I’d fallen in love with her like a Pavlonian experiment, one smoke break at a time. Whenever I lit up, I ached.
I sparked up a few times through the years. I’d sit outside waiting for something to make me feel beautiful again.
I quit cigarettes for good five years after she left. Stopped craving ten years later. Mostly.
But the damage never goes away. What it does to your heart. The stunted alveoli, a part of who you were asleep in your chest.
I stop the doctor mid exam. “I lied. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want my insurance rates to go up. But I want to be honest. I want an honest relationship. I’ve smoked.” I’ve burned.
“How long?” he asks.
“Maybe four years. When I was young.”
I expect him to call me an idiot, to say, You fool! How could you?!
Instead, he says, “Four years isn’t a long time. We don’t need to add it to the file. Tobacco-Free.” Then he makes a little mark on his paper like he’s drawing an X over my entire life.
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Barlow Adams is a writer and editor from the Cincinnati area. His work has been selected for Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and The Wigleaf Top 50. His name has appeared on the masthead of some cool journals, and the bathroom walls of some real dives. He enjoys imaginary cigarettes and the company of excessively wrinkly dogs.