The You

My clothes reek, it's the smell of coffee and cigarettes. This fabric, these clothes, hold it in like a memory. Imprinted like music on vinyl, they sing a song that is all too familiar. The sound of long nights and early mornings, smoke breaks and early warnings. The monument to my life, lived without a care in the world. You know they say tobacco kills you. You see that's the thing, it kills you… it doesn't kill me. couldn't kill me, even if it tried. I could light up, right up to the pearly gates but they would refuse to let me through. I'd share a cig with Peter just to pass the time, and be back at my apartment well before nine. At least that's what I thought before I first coughed up my own blood. It was the first time that threw me, but by the second I knew… I'd become You. The you that gets killed by tobacco companies, the you that doctors tell expected news. The you that I didn't want to be, the one I never expected but knew. I've never been the one to care, but now I don't have a clue. But my clothes smell of the memory before I was you.