He lights a cigarette.

He lights it and inhales its toxin.

He looks at me with eyes that’s full of pain.

He inhales his way to death and tells me that I’m the one he would’ve died for.

He inhales and exhales as I sit watching, motionless.

Speechless.

Why?

It’s all I can ask myself.

He inhales.

He inhales this untrustworthy drug and tells me how I was the only one he trusted.

I was the only one he believed in.

Me.

He inhales and exhales, inhales and exhales, inhales and exhales.

He removes the ashes.

I sit watching and can only think about how our flame has burnt out.

I’m now nothing but ash.

Ash from a flame that burned so brightly, so passionately, so beautifully.

Ash from a bunch of memories that burned like pictures thrown into an oblivion of flames.

Ash that now the wind will blow away, off into the distance and into the unknown.

He lights another cigarette.

He lights it and looks off into the distance.

He sits and thinks to his self.

Thoughts running through his mind at a 100 mph, maybe even more.

He exhales and looks at me.

He doesn’t say a word but I can see all the things he wants to say,

And all the wonder that lives in his eyes.

He wants to know why as much as I do.

He wants to know why I’ve betrayed him.

He wants to know my reasoning.

He wants to know and I can’t tell him because I want to know, too.

I exhale.

Shallow breathing and an aching heart.

Smoky air and black lungs.

Painful silences and eyes that can no longer meet.

I’m sorry.

It’s what I want to say but when I open my mouth, it won’t come out.

It won’t come out and I panic!

I panic and I breathe, and I panic and I breathe and I—

And I stop.

I stop myself.

I stop my thoughts.

I look at him and he looks at me.

When he looks at me, I can breathe.

When he looks away, I feel like I’m being dragged away as I reach out my hand in hopes that I can reach out to where he is so I can hang from his rope.

And he inhales.

He looks at me and tells me how we can no longer be.

He looks at me and tells me that it just can’t be.

He looks at me and then I breathe as he speaks about how it was all a lie,

And that he can’t let that fly.

He looks at me,

And I mean, he really looks at me.

I see that we…we can’t be,

But I see that he loves me.

He shakes his head at me as he inhales his cancerous drug.

Then I notice that it’s me that he inhales and exhales when he breathes.

For I am the cancer that lives within him.

His love for me like a cancer grows.

I am the one who is killing him softly.

He lights another cigarette.