Chain Smoking Cures Unrequited Love
My best friend for the past year or so has been a lesbian named Carli. I met Carli randomly at a Starbucks last August when we noticed we were wearing the exact same outfits; red t-shirts covered by a black polo shirt with black shorts and torn up chucks. It was like love at first sight, with out all of the corny butterflies, head over heels analogies, and at first, none of the unnecessary sexual tension that most of my boy-girl friendships seem to have hidden beneath them.
I never have been able to really get along with most guys. The general range of knowledge that most guys I have come into contact with seems to center around three main aspects of their lives; drinking, sports, and cars. While I do enjoy drinking vodka occasionally, their cavemanesque weekend rituals of drinking a case of Natty Light, hitting on drunken sorority girls, and watching football is utterly unappealing to me.
I think that's why I can relate to Carli so much, our ideas of a good time are much more in tune than with most people. Carli is someone who is perfectly content with sitting around and watching weird foreign movies all night and talking about the hidden meanings behind the imagery. She isn't someone who demands high fashion or expensive nights out to have a good time. She is chill and down to earth and I love her more than I have ever loved anyone else.
My favorite nights with her are the ones where we just spend hours upon hours sitting at the corner table outside of the same Starbucks where I met her, chain smoking packs of cheap cigarettes, even though we could afford the name brand, and watching people come in and out. When I first met her, we were a part of a large group of people that would come there nightly and hang out, sharing dollar menu food from Wendy's and junior sized hot chocolates when they still cost just a dollar. Some nights we would stay out until 2 a.m., watching the baristas clean up the Starbucks, and not leaving until the street cleaners came and kicked up dust and paper wrappers everywhere, making it almost impossible to breathe.
In the following weeks, all of the people in our group had already started moving on with their lives. Most of the people went away to college, but even the ones who were still in high school had to go home early to meet curfews and do their nightly algebra homework. Soon, it was just me and Carli, the two wallflowers always in the same spot every night, always watching. Sometimes she would make me write her poetry, but I never was able to get inspired enough to write full pieces. Eventually, I just started writing haikus, and they would come out in pages. She would take pictures to go with my words, and we would put them together in some cliché attempt at being artsy and avant-garde.
She doesn't think that
I mean it when I tell her
I'm in love with her
The night I realized I was in love with Carli was one of the last warm nights of the summer. I told her I was taking her to a secret place, and she was skeptical at first, but finally let me lead her to my paradise hidden behind the bars. We parked our car on some side street where we wouldn't get towed, and I grabbed her hand and we started skipping down the wooden stairs and down the cement path. When we got closer to our destination, I let go of Carli's hand and darted off the path and into the woods. I yelled back to her, and told her to follow me. She looked down at the wet and muddy path beneath her, and yelled sarcastically back at me, "You could have told me we were going to play boy scouts and hike through the woods. At least then I could have been prepared and could have worn my older sneakers."
She cautiously stepped off the cracked and buckling cement path and started after me. About forty yards into the woods, the trees and dirt gave way to a steel and concrete monolith of a highway overpass hidden in the middle of the forest. The walls of the overpass were covered in faded graffiti tags of obscene symbols and lovers names.
I was sitting at the edge of the concrete barrier when Carli came out from the woods, my shoes already off and my feet dangling carelessly over the river as the water splashed up off the rocks and kissed my toes.
I waved to her, and Carli walked over to where I was sitting, carefully stepping over the broken glass and half smoked cigarettes that lay strewn beneath her feet. I started to take the pieces of my hookah out of my messenger bag as she stood over me. I noticed the pebbles on the ground around her feet start to jump, and seconds later a train rushed by us on the opposite side of the river.
"I wonder what they ship on those trains," I wondered out loud to Carli.
She took her cigarettes out of her back pocket and lit one as she watched the train slowly disappear into the distant tree line. "Hoboes, obviously," she said with a smirk and she started puffing at her cigarette.
She stayed standing until she was done with her cigarette, looking over the river and listening to the frogs and crickets as their springtime melodies slowly started back up one by one after the departure of the midnight train. She flicked her cigarette over the river, and it collided with a low hanging branch, causing an explosion of embers to plummet into the water beneath, like fireworks.
Carli started to kick aside the small rocks and pebbles from underneath her, and she finally sat down next to me. She put her head on my shoulder as I started to light the coal. The flame from my lighter danced all over the coal, letting off a popping sound and the subtle smell of ashes and sulfur.
I carefully placed the lit disc on top of the hookah, reached for the hose, and started to breathe in and smoke it. The rolling sound of bubbling water inside the glass base drowned out the cricket's songs, and soon the sweet smell of acai berry smoke started to drift over the river. I looked up at the sky, and let out a long stream of thick smoke. We watched the smoke drift into the tree branches above them, where the cloud of smoke twisted and dissipated, fading out and clinging to the stars.
I fell in love with her that night, sitting on the river bed, smoking hookah for hours. She kept talking about the problems she was having with these two girls she was seeing, and it took everything I had not go get up and scream "I love you Carli! I want to be with you always and grow old with you, and have lots of babies, and buy a farm and raise horses." I sat there silently, listening to her talking about other people. She was a lesbian, and she would never really feel anything for me.
smoke clings to the light
like moths dancing in circles
boucing back and forth
One night shortly after that, when we were sitting at Denny's, Carli told me that she thought she was suicidal. I looked at her for a second, and asked her why she thought that. She exhaled her cigarette and said "I smoke." She tapped her cigarette into an empty creamer container, completely ignoring the ash tray inches away from her hand. It was hard to see it behind all of the trash strewn across the empty battle field that was our table. There were two ashtrays full of burnt and crumpled cigarettes and mounds of empty sugar packets piled high in old French fry bowls and creamer shots still dripping their remains onto the table.
"What does that have to do with anything?" I sneered back at her as I put out my cigarette in the overflowing ashtray, spilling ashes over the side. "I smoke all of the time, and I am not suicidal."
"I read an article the other day; it said that every cigarette you smoke takes away twelve seconds from your life." She twirled her cigarette between her fingers as her gaze rose up from her shoes and turned into a stone cold glare directly into my eyes. "I am a chain smoker, so I am killing myself twelve seconds at a time. I smoke two packs a day, which means that I am giving up at least eight minutes of life every day."
I thought about this for a second, thumbing the half full pack of cigarettes in my sweatshirt pocket. "Then why don't you quit?" I finally said to her as she started to exhale smoke rings towards my face.
She looked at me, directly in my eyes, almost glaring, and said "who the hell wants to be old anyways?"
I said nothing at this. I just lit another cigarette and starting puffing away. I guess I was suicidal too.
Me and Carli started doing cocaine around this time, at the end of September when the leaves were just beginning to shrivel up and turn into oranges and browns. The first time we did it together was with one of her friends, Brad. We snuck into this new house that was being built in his development. The floors and walls were done, but they never really got around to installing locks on the doors yet. We wandered around the empty house for a few minutes, mostly yelling to see how our voice echoed through the cavernous house. We laid there in the middle of the living room floor and smoked pot out of an apple bowl while watching the stars through the two-story high window they had over their front door.
Eventually we got tired of just laying around and wandered into the upstairs of the house, where we found several mirrors lying in a bedroom, waiting to be installed in the nearby bathrooms. Carli took out a small baggy from her purse, and started drawing out lines on top of the mirrors. We each did two lines, and I started to feel the effects of the drug almost immediately. Carli started to clean off the mirrors, but Brad stopped her. He said that it would be funny for the construction crew to come in and find their mirrors all covered in powder. I have always been scared of going back near that house, as if some random neighbor would point me out somehow and I would get blamed for drug-coating overpriced mirrors and sent to prison.
After this, I started experimenting with a few different drugs. Carli never drank or did any other harder drugs, but she would always do cocaine with me. Our nights changed from chain smoking cigarettes to doing lines when the waitress at Denny's was turned around. We were young and we were reckless, and the rest of the world just didn't matter.
There were many times when me and Carli would just decided to take trips to cities within a days driving distance, just to get out of our boring suburban lives and get a taste of what else was out there in the world. We would both get up early on Saturday mornings and just leave without telling anyone. I think those hours stuck alone in a car with her were some of the best of my life. They were mornings spent with cheap gas station cigars, packs of energy drinks, and plenty of off-key singing of corny pop songs, always seeming to be complemented by the completely sunny days, something we almost never see living in ..:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />Northeast Ohio.
Our first trip we ended up going to Columbus to visit the zoo there. They were redoing all of the parking areas, so it seemed like we had to walk a mile through a desert of torn up cement and sand to get to the zoo. The zoo was fun and all, but they didn't have any penguins or giraffes, and a lot of the sections were being renovated, so it was a slight disappointment.
After the zoo, we went to a local Steak n Shake. We got stuck with a trainee server, who was obviously nervous and messing everyone's order up. When she brought out our shakes, she forgot to give us spoons or straws, and she claimed she would be right back with them. Ten minutes later, still no straws, so we ended up asking another waiter who walked by to get us some. After that, we got the best service of our lives, with at least three different waiters coming up to us every 5 minutes, just to make sure everything was A-Okay.
Right as we were getting ready to leave, I notice this really tall and adorable girl walking pass the table. She was wearing a tight green Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles T-shirt and cut off jeans. I watched this girl walk pass us to a far table, and then looked over at Carli, who was drooling over this girl even more than I was, going as far as to almost completely turn around in her seat. I looked at her with a fake look of disgust and called her a whore, and we both laughed. It's great to have a best friend with the exact same taste in girls as you do.
After we left Steak and Shake, we did a few lines of coke off a CD cover I had in the back seat of my car, and wandered around downtown Columbus, smoking overprices clove cigarettes and taking pictures of the urban landscape. We passed this elderly black man who was sitting out in his yard alone. He was having some sort of yard sale, but the only thing he was selling was a selection of about three dozen different chairs. We waved to him and said hello, but we quickly moved past his house.
Eventually, we ended up at this inner city playground, and watched some kids play on the wooden and rusty playground equipment until we heard a rumble above us. A plane came out of nowhere, about 200 feet above our heads, and disappeared over a nearby tree line. We decided to follow it, and found out that just over the hill; there were these old unused rail road tracks in the middle of the city. There were wild flowers growing out of the cracks in the rail road ties, and the metal was starting to buckle over years of neglect and no use. We laid out on a flat part of the tracks, and we did a few more lines of coke and I took some ecstasy, and we watched the sun set over the tree line. We sat there on those train tracks for hours, watching the planes fly overhead, spitting out poems and trying to think of ideas for photo shoots that we could do when we got back to Kent. I filled up 16 pages in my notebook that night, and it was perfect.
stars light up the sky
illuminating your face
please, just dance with me
The first time that we kissed was the first night it snowed last winter. The temperature drop came unexpectedly, and people were still trying to get by wearing just a light sweater, visibly shaking from the cold as they went hastily from their cars inside the coffee shop. Me and Carli were still sitting in our normal spots, using hoodies as seat cushions on the metal chairs so that our butts wouldn't get cold and frozen. It was about an hour after close when it finally started snowing, first as one or two solitary flakes of snow uncomfortably clinging to our noses and giving us and undesired chill. Then seconds later, it started falling in blankets, spinning around the street lights and lighting up the sky like white diamonds. I prematurely smashed out my cigarette on the pillar by the table, and grabbed her arm and yanked her out of her seat. We ran into the middle of the empty parking lot and I let her go. She snapped at me angrily, asking what was wrong with me, and why did I take her out of her seat. I looked at her, and said "dance with me." She smiled, and we spun in circles, in some sort of half assed ballroom fashion. I then let her go, and went to my car and turned on the stereo, so that we would have proper music to dance too. We spent the rest of the night slow-dancing to Death Cab for Cutie's album "Transatlanticism," as the snow stuck to our black hair in clumps and our cheeks turned red from the cold. She poked my face, and told me that I looked like a rag doll with my cheeks being so red. I stuck my tongue out at her, and she smiled at me, and kissed me. I stood their stoically, as I watched her scampering away, taunting for me to chase her, but I couldn't move. I just touched the spot on my mouth where her lips just were. It was slightly warm with the light dew of her saliva still clinging to them. I felt the remains of her kiss on my mouth, and I felt invincible.
After this night, I was hoping that things would start to pick up between me and Carli, but I found out that her kiss was much more innocent than I had wanted it to be. The next time we hung out, we went to a small party at our friend's apartment. I was drinking vodka and was slightly drunk, and we were dancing in our underwear to old and underappreciated eighties pop music. She slipped on the blankets somehow, and tripped into me, and I caught her. I looked her in the face, as she was laughing over her clumsiness, and I tried to kiss her. Our lips touched, and she quickly pushed me away. I looked at her, and mouthed clumsily, "but I love you."
Her happy face quickly turned dark and shallow, and she whispered to me "I'm sorry" and left the room. I stood there, looking at the doorway, hoping that she would come running back, jumping into my arms and kissing me passionately. She never came back, and after a few minutes of staring, I just fell into a heap on the corner of the bed, lit a cigarette, and started committing twelve second suicides for the rest of the night. There is nothing like cigarettes to cure unrequited love.
tears waiting to fall
only the dashboard will see
something is missing
Carli didn't talk to me for a few days after that. I don't blame her; it was probably a massive shock to her to have her supposed best friend come out of nowhere and declare his love for her. I sent her some text messages and facebook wall comments, and she ignored them for a few days, but eventually she started returning them, and pretty soon things were back to normal between us. I was still in love with her, and it still killed me more than my cigarettes did when would talk about other girls she was in love with, but I was able to suppress it to save my best friend.
The last time that I ever saw Carli was on a random day trip to Pittsburgh to celebrate the completion of our final exams. I had just written a seven thousand word term paper for Linguistics the night before, and I called her and said that we are leaving in the morning. She didn't even ask where we were going or why, and I honestly don't think she really cared, as long as we were anywhere but Aurora, Ohio.
We ended up going to the Pittsburgh Zoo, which was much small and had fewer animals then its brochure and website made it seem. We should have known that it was going to be sub par when we got there and they didn't even charge the standard five dollars that most places charge for parking. The tickets themselves were only eight dollars, pretty cheap considering most zoos that I have gone to charge at least fifteen dollars for an adult ticket.
When we got through the ticket booth, we had to take a giant escalator to get to the actual zoo. Carli and me sat down to ride it up, getting the glares from several soccer moms holding the hands of their children. I felt out of place the whole time I was at the zoo, two random college students walking amongst a sea of parents armed with fanny packs and pushing strollers filled with small children, eyes wide open in amazement at the sight of their favorite animals in person.
Carli and me were paying more attention to the people who were walking past us than to the actual animals. We would stop to look at them just sleeping or laying around, and then quickly get bored and move on. On the way between exhibits we would point out to each other how out of fashion most of the people at the zoo were, and tried to find any people who we would even closely relate too. Every person we found there was either fifteen years older or younger than us though. On our way out of the African Safari exhibit, I stopped to use the restroom. When I had come out, I had found that Carli had disappeared. I started to wander around, trying to figure out where she was. When I couldn't find her, I called her cell phone. As soon as it connected and started ringing, she jumped on my back from nowhere, and said "I got you a present." She had sneaked off into the nearby gift shop and bought me this small stuffed elephant. I laughed at the corny gesture of our friendship, and carried it around with me for the rest of our time at the zoo on my shoulder.
After the zoo, we traveled across the city to go to the Andy Warhol Museum. Finally we got out of the mess of soccer moms and small children and were submersed in a culture much like our own. We spent our time slowly walking down the seven floors, starting at the top and slowly working our way back down to the bottom, stopping often to admire the artwork and to try and take pictures for ourselves.
On the fifth floor, there is an exhibit of floating Mylar balloons that Warhol made. We waited twenty minutes for all of the small children and tourists to clear out of the small room so we could have it completely to ourselves. When the room finally cleared, we rushed in, and spun around like tops, balloons cascading off of our arms in spirals. We danced under the metallic balloons until we were laughing so hard we had to stop and sit in the corner, fearing a museum worker would come and kick us out before we could see the rest of the museum.
On the way home, we both rode barefoot. Carli had her feet propped on the dash, leaning backwards and soaking in the early summer sunlight. I told her that I was madly in love with her, and she responded with "you better be." She then made me promise to marry her if we both turned old and didn't find anyone better. I made her a ring out of a twist tie I had laying around my car, and formerly proposed to her as we were driving west down Interstate 80 back into Ohio. She wore my ring for the rest of her life.
I didn't find out that Carli had died until five days later. I had kept calling her and sending her emails online, but she never responded. Eventually, I woke up one morning with a voicemail from her mother. It was short, stating simply that "Carli died four days ago of a cocaine overdose." Carli was buried a day before I got the message. My best friend in the whole world dies, and I wasn't even there to see her funeral. I found out through some of out mutual friends that her parents specifically didn't invite me because they blamed me for getting her into drugs, even though it was her that got me into it.
I finally got to visit her grave five days after her death, after one of my friends finally told me what graveyard she was buried in. The ground was still loose around her grave, and the sot had not fully clung to the loose dirt beneath it. I got down on one knee in front of the grave and started to cry. My life was buried six feet under me, and it was too much to take. I eventually got up, and took the stuffed elephant she got me at the zoo and a notebook completely full of poetry and set them next to her grave. I kneeled down once again, and kissed the gravestone, whispering "I will always love you." As I walked away, I took out and lit a cigarette. With Carli gone, I don't think of cigarettes as twelve seconds suicides anymore. I think of them as twelve seconds closer to her.