This Is Not An Assignment

I don’t know why I do it; ever since I was five I’ve been preaching to other people about not doing it. I think it’s the smell. I love the smell on clothes, on fingers. I like the taste once it’s lingered in my mouth a bit. The taste is what takes me back: to steamed windshields, to Sunday mornings with the blinds open, the feeling of your tongue and your fingers wrapped around my own.

I don’t know who I am anymore, really. I don’t know what I am doing here, what I want to be. I can’t help feeling like I have settled, or help feeling that I’ve settled because of you. It kills me that we had a plan and now we are in the same city but we are more distant than ever. Tuesday would have been our one-year; instead I’m alone and lost. I made the mistake of letting us define me.

They—that anonymous, collective “they”—say that “you find yourself in college.” I liked who I was. I don’t want to find something new, something worse than what I began with. But despite not wanting it, I’m here—unsure if every move I make is done to please me, or the people around me.

A cigarette bummed from a friend warms me while I sit out in the cold. Soon, I will be tucked in, eyes closed, mind calmed, while others run about wildly, stumbling into each other in the dark. I, on the other hand, will be asleep, with my just my smoke-scented fingers resting gently next to my face on the pillow.