Smoke

He supports her more than she's comfortable. He offers to lead her, step by step, through the everything that makes her weak, but it frightens her. She always thought that she would have to do this alone, would have to muster her own strength.

She's not supposed to lean on someone who will eventually break her heart.

He holds her hand even though she's lifeless, weightless as smoke, boring because she's too caught up in her afflictions. He holds her for a long time even though he doesn't know the full story, could never understand her pain.

When he's drunk he shares the same bed with her and presses against her from behind, puts his hand up her shirt and craves her. But there are other people in the room and he's breathing too loudly, so she tries to keep his hands in hers. Still, he touches all over and she forces herself to finish him with her hand. She sticks around to make it seem intimate, but eventually leaves to go back to her room because being so close is unnerving.

Like smoke, she fades.

Later, she even sends him a text that involves the words 'sorry,' and 'hun,' and 'these beds are just too small.'

'Ha ha.'

She's addicted to sweet-flavored tobacco. It makes her so dizzy that she's scared to stand up, afraid that she'll make a fool of herself. But, wait, the medication does that, too.

In the lazy, abstract shapes of smoke are the memories and the flashbacks and the thoughts of hopelessness that haunt her. The gray shapes images that she prefers to forget, words regrettably left unsaid.

She thinks a lot, fruity aftertaste left for her brooding.

He's somewhere in the haze, somewhere in the aroma of nicotine and carbon monoxide. There's guilt and regret mixed in the flavor because she wants to give him everything, and anything, but she knows she is incapable.

She tries so hard to make him see through the brume and realize that she will break his heart long before he breaks hers.