Tobacco

My fingers smell of tobacco. It is odd how this is so. I haven't touched a cigarette today. I do not smoke. I sniff my fingers and I am back on a step in the rain and the boy I was hung up on is there, somewhere, smoking, playing music. Leaping up to pace restlessly. I am a membrane away from a cigarette. It is already on my fingers. I sniff them and I am a well of hunger, for the cigarette, but also for the boy. The years of pointless longing, the nights of pointless sex, knowing that even as his body meshed with mine he was somewhere else entirely. I was never there in his bed, his eyes glazed over, his mouth humming a tune, his fingers plucking me as if I were a set of 12 strings for his guitar.

The impossibility of that kind of relating made me dig my claws in to hang on. My mind scratched at it until there was a deep weeping rent in my thoughts. So long in the healing. Am I healed? I saw him this year. He had been to a funeral. He found himself near to me and his eyes half focused when he said hello. He was wondering perhaps. Who is this girl? Was she once in my bed? I was. For what it was worth. Which is nothing.

Me on the step in the rain smoking. Him smoking, somewhere else. We shared the same tobacco which is about the closest we came to connecting. Two edgy, lonely folk and nothing between us except longing.

I hold my fingers to my nose and I sniff and I wonder what odd alchemy has made my fingers smell of tobacco.