Smoke and perfume

It’s so painful sometimes, it makes me sick. My head hurts in a million ways, but that’s not as many as my soul feels itself torn apart. It all starts as a game, when you bet the least bit you have left on the ‘all or nothing’ routine and the cards don’t seem to be favorable.

I was sitting at the table, watching them at their target practice while I was sipping on my second Bloody Mary and trying to push the cigarette’s smoke from my face. After a few moves made me feel misplaced, I knew I wanted to be more than I did seem in the first place. Secondly, there was a feeling of replacement that hit me when I saw a certain exchange of glances and smiles. I didn’t know what I wanted to prove, and I didn’t know if I could do it.

I stood up, went to them, and said: ‘see that highest target? I bet I can shoot it down. It will fall and reach the ground in an awful sound and make a mess in its way down. It will amuse me as to lift an eyebrow, and ruin everything. Who cares I have to pay on the way out?’ And I bet then my last bullet on destroying everything. Even if I was to fail, I’d be left with an empty gun in a world full of coyotes, all out to get you. The steel feels so cold..

It was all quiet when they heard a gunshot. No screams, fuss, there was nothing but dust in the air, while the sound of fallen metal echoed in the silence. I could still feel my heart beat although I would have thought that was supposed to be the moment it stops.

(Give me a gun and a license to kill and I’ll set the targets right once and for all, but don’t leave me in a shallow place with no other options-I have the talent of destroying what’s best in the all-or-nothing games)

It smelt like cigarettes and dead hopes everywhere. You couldn’t help but noticing the lost stare on most of the peoples’ eyes in that forgotten little bar. Like it or not, you face that time in your life when you sell yourself: for others’ emotions, for hopes, dreams, wealth or sins of the flesh. It’s all a matter of how you sell and to whom-we all end up empty, anyway.

My book doesn’t need to be written. It’s writing itself here and now, and my words going on and on do nothing but to fill the blanks I have left until my final point.

I remembered : I was cold, holding on to myself, setting aside what I know to see what I have left, and somehow this countdown doesn’t seem to end soon. Was I too much of a fool? When I got out I could still feel my hair smelling of cigarettes, the dead hopes lost themselves on the way to the door. I took my red scarf from my bag and tied it around my neck. It smelt like perfume, my perfume.

And when, like through a dream, I heard the plastic bag wrapped on my face, I knew it was all over.

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