One of the first times I took the 104 to Dadeland after school to meet you, we walked behind the football field and over a small bridge on 67th avenue into a suburban block and sat down on the asphalt. You smoked a cigarette and I sat with my legs crossed. I must have been wearing those tight black jeans - because I always wore them, not because I remember - and the cheap spandex in the denim must have caught onto the street and the little ridges must have dug deep into my ass but I didn't care. I was with you, my girlfriend, my first real girlfriend, feeling grown-up and impossibly young at the same time, already so lost in infatuation that I thought it so cool of you to talk of how tobacco made you need to poop, unknowing of how I would react or what I would think and blazingly uncaring.
     Tonight I find Sierra Nevada Torpedoes in my parent's fridge and smile because they only buy them in anticipation of me, steal one of my Mom's cigarettes and sit outside in the yard and smoke. I think of fields of tobacco in the Chesapeake, of 18th century umbilical lifelines stretching across thousands of swaying miles of open sea, of the transition of early American cash crops and the salty human odors of trans-Atlantic voyages by sail, long before I think of Churchill's and the punk ethics of smoking and of you. It's strange to remember you in a positive light, to place myself in 16 year old wide eyed shoes where the world seemed contained in your khaki shorts placed idyllic on the pavement. It's weird to even think I found it comfortable forming the syllables of your name in my mouth. 

     Though honesty never comes easy to me, I know the love I felt for you existed and that it left a long time ago. I know the crushing sense of loneliness I feel right this moment, the pitiable and weak obsession with comfort in another person, is not a longing for that particular love's return. There are so many little bits and pieces that would have to be attached to any form of communication that I can even say I don't, and won't ever, want to talk to you. Yet sometimes I wonder, alone and building up nicotine dependence in a place I once knew you well, how the ties and relationships we build with people can deteriorate so deeply that they become vague rumors of themselves. I still hold you accountable, and really, if I'm trying to be honest, I'm past the point where an apology really fixes anything. There's not even anything left to fix. But fuck, how I would like to speak with you to help my memory, to place pieces together and track how badly things got. Because even after all the shit you pulled, all the malice and all the manipulation, I can't seem to delineate clearly how I fell from the stark stupidity of one extreme to the cold embrace of another.