First Snow

I walk outside and light a cigarette. Every one I smoke is dedicated to him. Everything is still, unmoving, like I landed straight into a ghost town. I focus on the smell of snow in the air, the promise of those dancing flakes that makes my heart feel like it's about to burst out of my ribcage. Then I look up. There they are, those wonderful clouds. Just a little more time. I pull out another cigarette and light it feebly.

I don't know exactly when I started smoking-after Philadelphia, I guess. That last fateful encounter that left us both broken again. It feels good, fitting into the pattern I've been creating for two years now. After Philadelphia I took up smoking, quite a hypocritical act on my part since I always criticized him about that, always telling him that those things would kill him. But it made me feel so close to him... only Mom knew about it, and very unlike Lorelai, she never asked me why. She just started to fill the house with every crazy looking ashtray she could find.

I took another long drag as I remembered the first year I stood in the falling snow smoking.

O * o * o * o * o * O

Christmas night in Stars Hollow. I was on a brief vacation from the campaign because Obama himself took two weeks off. As usual, all the residents were asleep, so nobody saw me as I made my way to the bridge, our bridge, and took a seat on the edge. The first cigarette was finished in a couple of minutes, but my memories were still running like crazy in my mind, never stopping, not even for a heartbeat so I could catch my breath. I refused to cry as I lit another one and took a long drag.

I was getting so good at this-at hiding my feelings behind a brick wall. Working certainly helped, though following our now president around in a bus, sleeping in crappy hotel rooms, and eating on the run was not ideal. But I never had time to think. After the day was closed, the day's article checked and rechecked and finally sent, I would be so tired I usually didn't know how to find the bed fast enough, and fell asleep as soon as my head would hit the pillow. But even in my sleep, I could not escape. Dreams of all kinds, shapes and sizes would invade my mind, and even if sometimes the dream would be happy, I would still wake up in tears.

O * o * o * o * o * O

First snow always finds me outside smoking, waiting for it, like I would wait a lover to come and ease the knots in my stomach...

The very first flake to hit me lands on my eyelash, as I look up expectantly. I smile.

All's right in the world again.

Later, almost frozen to death, I started to make my way back to my small, cramped apartment where I currently resided, in New York. I never even hoped for a good job at first, after the campaign trail, but I applied anyway at a lot of newspapers, and I was shocked out of my shoes when the editor-in-chief at The Times called. I now had a small column reviewing anything and everything-art, books, movies, plays, concerts-you name it, I wrote about it. And still, the one thing missing in my life was him. I couldn't even think his name. It burned my heart in such a way that I would feel it was being wrenched out again and stomped all over, stabbed, and lit on fire at the same time.

I never dared to call him even though I had his number. I never dared to e-mail him even though I had the e-mail address. I never dared to write a letter even though I perfectly knew the address of Truncheon Books. What I did instead was read. Memorize his book. And then the next one, and the next. Three books I knew by heart, and still was the Cowardly Lion that never met the Wizard. Every day would be the same 'Tomorrow. Tomorrow, I will call him-I promise.'

Two years filled with tomorrows and I was still here, living in a crappy apartment filled with books movies and take-out menus, and a dog - my faithful Paul Anka Junior, in the words of the reigning Lorelai, produced and raised on the streets of New York, only to be found by yours truly in a shelter, scheduled for euthanasia in a week. I fell in love then and there. He was a weird combination between a Golden Retriever and a Chow-chow. But he was my only companion aside from Mom. She was happily married to Luke, finally, and I was honestly happy for her.

I sighed and pulled out another cigarette as I sat down on my beaten up couch and reached for the tattered old copy of the book titled The Subsect. After the first twenty pages I was asleep.