I started smoking when I was nine years old. About a week after my ninth birthday actually. My dad had decided to leave my mom, packed up his things and left the house. Apart from trying to comprehend what was happening myself and explaining it to my five year old sister I was particularly...stressed. I found the pack of cigarettes in my dad's top dresser drawer as I rummaged through it for keepsakes. I had gotten along well with my dad, in fact our family had been fine, or so I thought. I never did learn what had made my dad leave. The pack was half gone. I had seen him smoke only on occasion, he tried to not smoke in front of us. But I had seen enough to know the process. I stuff the pack into my pocket, as well as a few pennies from another drawer and went to my room. I his the pack and waited a few days to see if my mom would somehow know I had it. She was good at knowing things, somehow. So once I was sure it was safe I took the pack, grabbed some matches from the kitchen cupboard and went for a walk. I went on some old horse trails that no one ever used anymore, except to do things that they didn't want other's seeing. But there was no one there when I went. I lit the cigarette and inhaled the smoke. I began to choke. After coughing for a minute I took a few deep breaths and tried again. And that day I became a smoker. I found ways to get cigarettes over the years until I was eighteen.
On that day I also became a nihilist.
I struggled with life from that day forward. School was hell, pure hell. I was bullied constantly any way anyone could possibly find. I simply would hide it, pretend I didn't care, act like it didn't matter. Really, it didn't matter. I mean, I never liked getting shoved against a wall and punched in the gut, but once it was over, it was over. It didn't matter. On occasion I'd get fired up and fight back, and when I did I won. I think what made people keep bullying me is that they knew I rarely fought back. Some of the kids stopped once they got a taste of my rebellion. On one occasion a couple of jocks decided to literally mug me in the hallway. They beat me up and forcefully took my wallet and the money I had in it. It wasn't that fact that I had lost the money that angered me so much, but the fact that it was my dad's wallet. This pissed me off. And I reacted. I was not tall, but I was muscular, with a wide chest and thick arms. I often thought I resembled a gorilla to some extent, though I had been fortunate to have decent looks from my mom's side. Anyway, I grabbed one of the jocks by the neck and swung him into the other, knocking them both to the ground. I picked up my wallet and pocketed it before approaching my fallen foes. I grabbed one and slammed him as hard as I could against the floor. His head made a loud cracking noise as it hit the linoleum floor. The other jock was about to get up but kicked him in the stomach, then stepped on his throat and held my foot there until he almost passed out. Then I ran away. This was probably the most violent I had ever been, even to this day. I almost scared myself.
I'm not sure what kept me from suicide. I thought about it a few times. I guess that fact that my little sister had no one else to look, since my mom was always working. Life seemed totally pointless, but I played that sick game of life all the way. I went to school studied, got good grades (mostly A's with the occasional B in some stupid class like Sex Ed where they taught us how to have sex safely, while still enjoying it, or some crap like that). When I got my first job at a fast food burger place at sixteen I worked my butt off and saved my money so I could buy a car and eventually a laptop for college, and for college itself. I worked, and worked, and worked some more, and still found time to help my little sister with whatever. My mom always told me she was proud of how hard I worked, and how great a big brother I was. Sometimes I was almost proud of myself, but then I was always reminded that it was all pointless in the long run. I guess I didn't just shoot myself because as stupid as it all seemed, I figured, so many other people do it, I guess I should just deal with it to. So I did. I dealt with it. Smoking the whole time. I smoked a whole pack in a day once, but that was one day in the summer when I was fifteen and had nothing else to do but smoke and read some corny adventure novel. But I generally tried to make a pack last me the whole week, for finances' sake. I loved smoking. I don't know why exactly, I mean the high I got from it eventually wore off, but I guess just the taste and the act of smoking helped relax me. I was addicted for sure, but I didn't care, because I liked it.
So I made it through high school and all the crap that came with it, and when I was eighteen started going to a small community college close to home. My first semester there was when I met Beth. We were in the same history class together. The first day, our less-than-enthusiastic teacher told everyone to find a friend. I was sitting in the back of the room, like I had always done in high school, and no one else was around me. Then there was Beth, beautiful stunning, head-turning Beth, sitting in the front of the class. She got right up and walked over to me and sat down next to me with all her books.
"I'm going to sit here, I can hear better from back here I think," she said. Then she handed me a small paper with her name and number on it. I didn't have a cell phone, so I gave her my name and e-mail address.
We always sat in the back of our history class together, and it sort of became a tradition half-way through the semester for us to eat lunch together in the cafeteria afterwards. We never talked personal stuff, it was always this or that; movies, music, books, games sometimes. She had four brothers, two younger and two older who were all gamers, and insisted that she know about video games. I didn't know much about them, since I had no way to play them. on occasion I watched gameplay videos online, just get a taste, but that was it. Her family was well to do, and she always seemed to have food for me. She'd pull a bag of chips, or a couple of granola bars from her bag and toss them to me saying "I wasn't going to eat them anyway." Somehow she seemed to know that I never had food. Maybe because I never bought lunch, and though I never told my mom, I refused to take food from home because my mom could barely afford to feed us. What food I did eat was usually any kind of fast food scraps I could scrounge up from the burger place. I manged though, and Beth's seemingly constant supply of snacks was a major blessing. The only I used my money for that wasn't required were my cigarettes. Those little things. I look back and just try not to think about how much money I spent on them.
I got a different job when I was nineteen as a bank teller. It payed much better, and I finally was able to start saving money again, instead of spending it all on school, my car, and gas. It wasn't much, but it was more than before. By the time I was twenty I had saved up a few thousand dollars. This was also when i decided to go to the doctors. I knew I wasn't exactly healthy, considering I smoked all the time and didn't eat very well. The only thing I did that was healthy was sleep, and go for a five mile run every day. But lately it had been getting harder, I was having a tough time breathing. I knew the answer. I had to stop smoking. But the doctor was kind enough to inform me that not smoking anymore would not accomplish anything. The cancer had been around too long, and there was nothing they could do now. It was too late. But like everything else I didn't care...at first.
Me and Beth had been together for two years, well as friends. Officially as boyfriend and girlfriend, it had been a year. my mom adored Beth, and my little sister did as well. Beth's family liked me as well, though I could tell her father was not exactly happy that I was of such a low class, with almost no money. But he had allowed us to date because Beth had convinced him of how hard a worker I was, and that sometimes it's not about money or social class or anything, but about what a person has on the inside. I thought that was all sort of cliche, but it was sweet how she stuck up for me. Plus we were allowed to date. And it wasn't a lie, I was a hard worker, and had promised Beth, and later her dad that I would work my finger to the bones to keep us together.
So now I had cancer. Twenty years old, and dying. The doctor had said I had maybe another year if I was lucky. I never told Beth about my smoking, and either she never smelled the smoke on me, or she turned a blind eye to it. Either way, my smoking was never something we talked about. But now we had to. I walked to a payphone outside the doctor's office and pushed in the change and dialed Beth's number. As the phone rang I remembered the past year, how wonderful it had been. Even the problems that we had had, the little arguments that occasionally happened, all of it was outshone by countless good times. The time we spent at the little coffee shop on the corner, the movies we saw together, the restaurants we ate at. All of it added up to the best year of my life. We had even recently started brushing the idea of marriage in the near future. But not anymore.
She picked up the phone.
"Hello?"
"Beth?"
"Hey!" she said happily, "how are you?"
"Beth...I love you."
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