LatinosUSA

It was daybreak, early winter. In my 3^rd-floor atelier in the huge old house where I roomed during college. The large window at the end of the A-frame apartment was open, and the slight breeze was chilling. Macie sat cross-legged before the aperture, smoking a cigarette. This was not unusual. In her two years at university, she majored in Art History and smoking, with an emphasis on the latter.

I just awakened. The last I remembered from the night before, Macie was wrapped in my arms, beneath the comforter on my threadbare mattress. She smelled of tobacco and wine. During our collegiate years, Macie and I had both minored in sex–with the other. I had no other lovers. I loved Macie, I think. As regards her feelings for me, I think it is fair to say that she was at least used to me. You take what you’re given.

I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and looked into the sun rising in the window just beyond the 19-year-old woman I called my own. It was a flaming ball of unspent hydrogen, and I squinted. Staring at Macie’s back, I realized she was naked, and I wondered how long she had been sitting there, staring into the sun. I also had fleeting thoughts about how much longer Macie and I had together. She was, after all, far too pretty for the likes of me.

We met during freshman orientation, about two years ago. We hit it off instantly. Coming from distant but opposite ends of the country, we knew no one else and gravitated to what soon became familiar. Everyone wants to belong, to fit in. I thought, up until that moment, that I knew Macie better than I ever knew anyone. But, looking at her shapely backside and at the dark brown locks hiding her enigmatic mind, I wondered if I knew her at all.

She extinguished her cigarette after lighting another off the last. The glass ashtray at her knee held a dozen butts, so I knew she had been there for some time. Playfully, the previous night, before we made love, I’d told her that one day she would turn into a whiff of smoke, and she looked at me queerly. When I asked her once why she smoked so much, she took on a dreamy look and replied that it gave her release, “almost like coming.” I remember feeling a chill. I observed her now, rapidly drawing the fumes into her lungs and then expelling the smoke. It rose to the ceiling of the A-frame and lingered like a blue cloud.

Something unusual began to happen. The smoke surrounding Macie grew denser and darker. Pulling myself to an elbow, I tasted the wine and pot from the evening before and licked my dry lips. The smoke was so thick now, I wondered for a moment if she set the carpet afire. Peering intently, I could no longer make out Macie’s lovely face, only smoke. Then it descended to her shoulders and then her waist… A sudden fresh breeze blew through the open window and dispersed the smoke, and I looked at Macie. But she wasn’t there.

previously published in “Romance Buds and Butterflies”