He would be damned if he couldn't quit smoking. He didn't even like cigarettes, and wasn't completely sure he was even calmed by them anymore. After a good deal of drowning in student loans and jumping from girl to girl and bar to bar, Nathan couldn't be calmed by anything anymore. The cigarettes had to go.
Something had to change.
After five months of trying to quit, Nathan started to lose focus. He would be damned if he couldn't quit smoking, but jitters and headaches felt a lot like damnation. His mother's incessant calls weren't helping the flares of anger that he could get completely out of the blue. And his best friend calling him a girl about his determination to do this cold turkey wasn't helping the sleepless nights. 'Five months of this bullshit?' Nathan thought, pacing his tiny apartment in the pitch black.
Something had to change, soon.
Nathan had been able to deal with last minute essays, stuffy teachers, 1:00 AM wake up calls, a dorm room the size of a closet, and a cheating girlfriend for four years. But a small orange and white stick would be the death of him. At least, that's what it felt like with an unopened pack of his favorites in one hand and the other resting in his pocket. His breath fogged up the large window as he rested his forehead on it, looking down to the sidewalk twenty stories below. For so high up, he was in such a terrible place. The kitchen seemed to be a scaled down model, and its dirty white tile made Nathan uneasy when he stepped foot on it without shoes on. His bedroom was not much bigger, and the fact that the previous resident had painted it a dark blue made it seem like he was sleeping in a grand walk in closet. The place was depressing, and the air was contaminated with so much smoke by now that he figured all his friends would soon contract lung cancer, just from stepping foot in the space. He turned away from the window, shutting away his thoughts, and instead walked towards the door that led out to the hallway. It was only four in the afternoon, and he could find Tammy, his ex, waitressing in the diner a couple blocks away.
Tammy, like always, smiled at Nathan as he came in. Like always, it never reached her eyes. Nathan knew what she was doing; she was reliving their last moments as a couple, right after he found her in bed with some guy he had never seen before, and right before he had called her a slut. She was seeing that face– that look of disgust and betrayal and shock– instead of his tiny smile that she used to compare to his dorm room. She came over anyway, always the amicable and easy-going friend, and plopped herself down in the chair across from the one he was sitting in.
"Hey, Nate! Haven't seen you in a while. You actually have perfect timing, I just got off work," she giggled out, while he sat silently assessing her.
After a small, somewhat uncomfortable silence, he spoke. "Hey, Tammy. I've been trying to quit smoking."
She looked somewhat shocked, then grinned. "That's great! How's it been going so far?"
"Shitty."
Tammy frowned. "No it hasn't!" she yelled at him, seemingly hurt by his answer.
Nathan was taken aback, and chuckled at her statement. The first real laugh in five months, the first laugh with her in a year. "How would you know? We haven't seen each other in six, seven months. I've been trying to quit for five. I think I can safely assume it's been going terrible."
Tammy mimicked his small smile from before; maybe she had been watching the present instead of the past. "Now, that's not true. All this time, you've been holding those little cancer sticks in your hand, and none of them are even lit!" Tammy beamed at him again, her mind checking off a victory.
"Oh," he said, and looked down at the pack. He hadn't even realized they had been there at all after he had made up his mind to see her. He had just walked out of his apartment, into the elevator, and down to this hole in the wall without thinking of anything, really. He hadn't noticed a single person, or a single puff of smoke.
When he looked up, and beamed back at her, he realized help wasn't so bad, and that he needed to buy some of those damn patches.
And, also, something had finally changed.
No comments:
Post a Comment