Smoking. Her new habit. Pleasurable, just like the old advertisements said. The ones Simpson showed in Media Immersion. Didn't he know those old ads still had power?
She sat on her wrap around winding porch and inhaled the smoke into her lungs so slowly, exhaled it even slower. Saw how her fingers knew to hold the cigarette, giving them something to do. A new bad habit. No worse than her old ones.
She lived with Marco, her once love interest and now her friend. He had faded to that, like some favorite shirt washed and washed until the original color was almost gone. He'd faded from someone she got so excited about to someone dependable, someone encouraging, and that had to be a good thing. His being gay was just a matter of course now, not the turning away from her it had been in grade nine.
She lived with Paige. Paige had been everything she hated about school, about other people, about life. Paige had been judgments and easy dismissals and popularity. Paige had been her proof that she didn't fit in. Now Paige was her friend, and she still marveled over that as she chewed her toast across the table from her. Those labels and boxes and descriptions had broken down, crumbled, faded away. That was as it should be, she supposed.
Craig. She'd been the only one to stand by him during the cocaine thing, the only one to stay when he pushed everyone away. How could she have thought he was telling the truth when he said he loved her? How could she believe him through the red eyes and the paranoia and the addict's need to be so selfish? But she had turned away, too. She'd had to. So desperate to get down to the bone, couldn't get to the bone quick enough.
Another cigarette. Couldn't she have some life threatening habits? She blew her smoke toward the sky, peered through it. Maybe it was like tea leaves, she could see the future. What had her love of Craig been about? Was she in love with him, or only with the way he made her feel? Maybe it wasn't love but a craving. A need, a shriveling of the cells along some pleasure pathway.
Now he was in Europe with Ashley. Ellie closed her eyes. Ashley. How had Ashley slipped in again? How had she reclaimed him so easily when she had abandoned everyone?
She could go to Europe and find him. She could fly across all the colored countries on the map, through all the foreign tongues. She could hear the babble and pick out the words she knew, it would be enough to find him.
She crushed her cigarette against the glass ashtray, the art deco colored glass ashtray that Marco would have a fit over if he knew she was using it for smoking. He might shriek and say that was art.
She could taste the smoke on her tongue, like ashes. Like recriminations. How could she still love Craig when he'd always chosen everyone else over her? How could she have such little self worth? How could she crave his rejection? His rough kisses? His dilated pupils? How could she want to help him when all he'd ever done was tear through her soft defenses, hack at the delicate meat of her heart? How could she like the pain he caused so much?
He'd hurt everyone he ever touched, she saw that. What made her think she'd be special? What made her think he'd be careful with her? Was she delusional? Was she a masochist?
She had visited him in rehab. The building, red bricks, cold cement. All those addicts in cages. Craig, the defeat and sorrow in his eyes. Dark shadows. His collar bones nearly visible with the weight loss. And her heart had cramped at the sight of him, and her own voice ringing in her ears, in her mind, I want him, was all it said.
What had she been thinking when she heard his soft voice in group? God, was that grade 11? Was that all those lifetimes ago, a time when she was whole and hadn't even been aware? Had she heard the chronicle of his troubles and thought she could save him? Had she thought she could be anything for him? Anything at all?
She dumped the ashes from Marco's ashtray and wiped it clean with the edge of her shirt. Looked up into the clear sky, free of smoke, and there was no future she could see. She'd have to keep working at putting the meat back on the bones.