Suffocate me

I bought my first pack of cigarettes on my 17th birthday. “Don’t judge me,” I told the wrinkled lady behind the counter. 

She stared at me blankly — “I wouldn’t have the right to.” 

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to smoke. My Daddy didn’t smoke, but my Uncle did and we borrowed his car when we went to visit Daddy. So, even though I didn’t know him very well, that smell reminded me of Daddy. Reminded Mom of Daddy too, even if she didn’t like to admit it.

Mom and Daddy were never really together, but Mom always loved him. Even when he got married to someone else, Mom loved him. Mom could handle everything except reality, and seeing Daddy with his pregnant wife was too much for her. 

“There’s a reason we moved, to get away from the whores," Mom would always say.

Daddy would visit me every so often, but the visits were never long enough, so I held onto what I knew about him, held onto his smell-- the smell of cigarettes. 

The visits from Daddy kept up as I grew up, but our relationship got thinner, and I grew frantic over it. 

Daddy’s love was too far -- Mom’s was too close.

After the move, Mom kept me confined to our house.

“You’re what I have left,” Mom would say with a shrug when I asked why I couldn’t go out and play with the neighborhood kids.

“What would I do if you were to get hurt, or die?” Mom would ask, when I was invited to ride bikes and I wanted to go.

“I don’t want to lose sight of you ever again!” Mom would demand when I strayed too far in the grocery store. 

I never knew how to respond when she said these things, so I stayed close by -- right beside her as she hid from her greatest fear. 

At 12, I began to see the visits from Daddy for what they were: a lifeline. To Mom, Daddy had always been the world, even when he left. During these visits, during those times when he spoke to Mom, I would watch from the kitchen as she angled her body towards him, away from me, a hand reaching up to twirl her hair. Daddy’s smile tight. 

But nothing lasts, and Daddy grew bored with us, with the whole situation, with me. Our visits got shorter, the time between them grew longer, and then Daddy stopped coming around at all. 

Once that lifeline disappeared, Mom grew frazzled, desperate. I was the only thread of connection she had. 

“What would I do if I were to lose you?” Mom screamed.

“What would I be without you?” Mom shrieked.

“How could he have left me?” Mom yowled.

Tears streamed down her face, wetting her dirty cheeks.

I would shake in my seat, my food growing cold, fear shaving down my waistline. I would slink away from her, but she always came closer, crawled closer, her bulging red eyes seeing me wherever I fled. 

Her sadness overtook her, and, because there wasn’t anything left to do, Mom started smoking. We didn’t talk about Daddy anymore, it made Mom too sad, but the smell of her smoking kept him alive, for both of us. 

“Look how stupid we were!” she would shriek, holding up a picture of my father, the photograph flimsy and shaking in her hands, ash flying onto the floor as she twitched.

The next morning Mom would want me to drive her to the mall.

“He’ll come back soon,” she’d say, her hand running along a men’s polo shirt at Macys.

“This work trip has been really stressful. I’m sure he’ll be glad we got these for him when he gets home.”

Most of the clothes ended up in the dumpster once she remembered, but during her delusions, she was happy. 

When Mom figured out she was sick, the cancer was already too far along.

“Please, I’ve barely even smoked,” she pleaded with the doctor -- but the cancer didn’t care. 

After the diagnosis Mom became more confused, convinced Daddy had told her to move back to his neighborhood.

Two weeks later, we moved back into our old neighborhood, across from where Daddy used to stay. I fought her decision, but there wasn’t anyone else to say no. Daddy was absent.

“Oh — you won’t be the only one caring for me, Daddy will help!” she promised, but I was the only one caring for her. 

“I’m going to see my love!” she would sing softly to herself as I did her hair, put on her makeup, brushed her teeth. We never heard from Daddy. I spent all my days indoors, monitoring Mom’s frantic delusions, monitoring her fits of anger, monitoring her health. I pitied her. Pitied the chair sitting next to the where she would wait and watch the tenants from across the street come and go. Where she would wait and watch for him. 

At night, when another day had passed without a visit from Daddy, we would fight. 

We fought violently, loudly, vying to see who could cut the deepest. 

“You never let me outside!”

“Your father doesn’t love you!”

“My father doesn’t love you!”

“Please don’t leave! What would I do without you?!”

We’d shout until our voices went hoarse or the neighbors called the cops, whichever came first. But it didn’t matter. Daddy never visited. The fights became ritual, and I ran up to the roof after every fight, taking deep gulping breaths of the night air -- desperate to put all of the world inside of me so I didn’t have to live inside of it anymore. Mom would sit in her wheelchair, smoking an unauthorized cigarette, watching me go.

“If you leave, you can’t come back!” she screamed after me, but the door was always unlocked when I returned. I promised myself that one day I would leave her.

But I didn’t, and as soon as I turned 17, those walks up to the roof for big gulping breaths turned into walks up to the roof for cigarettes. The cigarettes felt more adult, and I felt closer than ever to Daddy when I smoked them. 

At some point we stopped yelling. I missed it. She stopped asking about Daddy. It made me sad. It made me wish I had someone to call, because when the scent of death crept into our apartment, Mom wasn’t lucid enough to notice. 

I went out for walks, met people, smoked whatever. My freedom drained my mother, and she got sicker everyday. I ignored her rambling calls and texts to come home, to clean her bed pan, to come home and give her food, to stop killing her. I lied to my friends, invented a Mom with an extravagant life. I swallowed tears before parties. I called 911 when I found her dead after a bender. I didn’t make arrangements for a funeral.

The heaviness stayed in the walls of that apartment, and since I had nowhere to go, I stayed, too. The yellow, nicotine-stained walls sat as a symbol of my mother – the stale smell of cigarette smoke a symbol of my father – the lonely rooftop a symbol of me.

I visit Mom’s grave when I can. I have forgiven her in the hope that she will forgive me, but her tombstone sits without flowers. 

I smoke everyday, two packs — my habit eats up my grocery money, I don’t mind. The nicotine fills my stomach. 

“Can I steal a cigarette?” I ask. My roommates give me two different packs to choose from. Air catches in my chest, and I take a shaky breath before I say, “thanks.” 

My roommates don’t pay rent anymore. “We’re a family,” they say, but sex happens when they want it, and I’m scared they don’t really like me. My money is running low. I worry that we’ll lose the apartment.

“What’s wrong with your neck?” my roommates ask one night. 

My right lymph node is visibly swollen. I think back to my mother, panic rising in my chest. I feel her fear when the doctor told her she had 3 months to live. I feel her anger when she called my father and got no response. Bile rises in my throat. 

I turn around and walk to my room without responding.

In the days before Mom’s death, she called me crying, begging for me to come home, to find Daddy, to bring him home too. “Let him witness my pain!” she wailed.

I had held the phone far away from my ear, so that her delusion wouldn’t infect me.

“Your neck looks weird.”

“It looks bad.” 

“You look unhealthy.”

My roommates pester me. They take me to an Ear, Nose, and Throat doctor, but I don’t leave the car, I’m too afraid to go. 

“How dare you waste this appointment.”

“You could die on us, you know that?” 

“Please let us consider your health for you.”

I stare at them, legs crossed in the backseat. “Can I have a cigarette?” 

“Sure,” they say.

My roommates don’t know how my mom died. They don’t know that we sleep and fuck in the room where I used to clean and dress her. They don’t know that Mom’s delusions of Daddy still haunt the rooms. They don’t know my fear.

I wake up in the mornings with no memory of falling asleep. Light trickles through the one bedroom window and lands on my roommates’ limbs stretched across my body. I try to move, but I’m weighed down. I groan and lay in bed, the three of us coughing every few minutes, almost in unison, but not quite.

I wiggle my arms out from under their arms and legs -- the movement wakes them. 

“Morning!” 

“Morning!” 

They are yelling, giving me hugs and kisses until I’m nauseous and tired. I want to get up, but they don’t, and I’m forced to twist and contort my body around them until someone cums. The heaviness of their bodies is unrelenting, and panic rises in my chest. I start to suffocate.

“Get off! Please! You’re suffocating me!” I sit up, panicked. I run out of the room, onto the stairway, onto the roof. Fresh air smacks me in the face, and the sunlight streams through the trees making me slightly warm. I tilt my head up to the sky, I pick up my phone. I call Daddy. He doesn’t pick up, but I call again and again and again, until it's dusk.

My roommates appear behind me, their eyes are concerned. They ask me what is wrong, they stroke my hair. They offer me a cigarette.

“Nothing is wrong,” I say, wriggling out of their grasp.

My roommates don’t listen. They hug me tight, wrapping me in claustrophobia. Sobs wrack my body. 

My throat throbs.

I breathe into myself shakily. They light my cigarette.

“I want to go see Daddy.”

My roommates raise their eyebrows. They don’t know Daddy. 

Smoke from our cigarettes billows out around us.

“I’m sorry, my father, he’s expecting me.” A faint glimmer of hope comes into my voice as I say what I want to bet true. My father is out there, he is expecting me. 

I take a drag and ash the rest. My roommates are silent, so I run back down the stairs. The pitter patter of feet follows behind me.

I want to go alone, but my roommates decide to come anyway. 

There is no letting me out of their sight. 

“Why do you stay?” I ask halfway out the apartment door.

“Stay where?” My roommates exchange a glance I don’t understand.

“Stay in this apartment, with me.”

My roommates smile. Their gaze holds me in place.

“What would we be without you?”