Cigarettes and everything in between

I’ve quit smoking, I swear, but after a series of colorful swearing at a vehicle I couldn’t even see, which was currently at the very front of this motionless line of wheels, I felt like I could do with a puff. With one hand I pulled down the sun visor to shield my eyes from the setting sun’s stubborn rays and with my free hand I reached into the glove compartment of my old mustang which was older than I will ever be in this life. I went through its contents; mostly garbage, blindly till my fingers curled around a familiar rectangular box. I made a mental note to clean my car, but come on; will that help me to get my life together? I highly doubted it.

At random, I pulled out a finely rolled cylinder shaped cigarette out from the pack, and held it between my index and thumb momentarily examining it, appreciating its classy configuration. It was just finely cut, treated tobacco leaves wrapped within a thin paper, thinner than my patience, nothing more and nothing less. Yet, to think that something this small, smaller than my pinkie, had the power to take a person’s life was truly fascinating.

But then again, even the mere cigarette had preferences with which smoker it wanted to burn down with itself. I mean, I’ve been a chronic smoker for more than twenty years, but it was still him dying from lung cancer and not me. Him; whom I’ve detested for almost half a century and I say almost, because my fiftieth birthday was only a month away and because I probably wasn’t born hating him.

He had always been good at everything. When he held a pencil for the first time, he created art and when he put his heart into something, he was already a winner. He was the pride of our family of three, while I was the cigarette butt. He always made our late mother proud and I guess she deserved at least one son like him, for all the hardships she had to go through to make men out of the two of us.

Don’t get me wrong, I never envied my older brother. He was by all means a perfect human, and with our five year age gap, I found myself constantly running after him throughout my life. His magnificent shadow hovered over my fragile teenage self-esteem, and as time went on I realized that I will forever be under the shade of his achievements. It had been so that the sunlight never touched even a strand of hair on my small round head.

The sunlight; our mother’s love.

Instead of getting washed over by sunlight, I was washed over by pity. But back then I had a thin patience and a tall ego. So like a man, I moved out of our so called house on the day of my twenty fifth birthday. Though it had been a decision made by my half-drunkard-self, I never really regretted it, even now. I moved over to the big city and worked my cigarette butt off, in hopes of achieving something to shove against his trophy face. Now that I look back, it's been almost twenty five more years since then, and I still had achieved nothing. Pity indeed.

Of course, my life in the big city hadn’t been magical back then, nor was it now. Long hours of work shifts, sleep deprivation and depression were only just the tip of the iceberg of problems that I had to survive against. Meanwhile, my brother stayed behind, in that good for nothing town earning a living enough for himself and our mother. He was doing better off than me, living the life I've always wanted, while it was too late for me to turn around. But I still feared being pitied the most, so every year I’d wire him a hefty amount of money in the name of our mother.

“It’s her maintenance cost,” I’d say to him over the phone, and I’d hear him sigh after a long silence.

“You stay healthy,” He’d add before hanging up. I wonder why I never said, “You too,” back at him. Would he have lived a healthier life if so? 

The last time I had seen him was at her funeral. Our mother looked as bright as the afternoon sun even at her deathbed. And as I stared at her sculpture like body frame sleeping peacefully, I regretted most of my life choices. Should I have visited her more? Would she have made me my favorite dishes? The answer to the latter was a ‘no,’ for she didn’t know my favorite dishes. In her head, those very dishes were the ones my brother liked to eat, that’s why she had taught him how to cook them her way. Later on, I had tried recreating most of her recipes only to fail miserably each time. And with my impossible personality, there was no way I’d have asked him for the recipes.

A loud honk from the car behind me snapped me out from my trance. I manually roll down my window to put my free hand out and gave the driver behind me the middle finger, which was actually meant for myself. The cigarette in my left hand was bent a little from the pressure I had unconsciously been applying to it, so I bent it in the opposite direction in hopes of straightening it. Then I placed it between my thin cyanosed lips.

It wasn’t that hard to find the lighter, since it was always where it had been for almost twenty years, in the small hole in front of the gear box. It was the same lighter he had given me after our mother’s funeral service when I was dying for a smoke and obviously had no lighter with me.

“Why do you always carry one when you hardly smoke?” I had asked him with something close to a smirk.

“I thought you’d need it. You always leave things behind when you’re panicking.”

“I don’t,” I had retorted back immediately as I lit my cigarette with it anyway, and aimed the puff at the sky where our mother was probably at, by now.

“Do you think she has entered through the gates?” He had asked me out of the blue, and I had turned to look at him.

I found him staring up at the cloudy sky with an unreadable expression. It was my first time, seeing him look worried, uncertain and terrified. 

“Of course,” I had said with certainty, masking my own emotions of fear behind a casual shrug.

We had then parted ways, and like a coward I had once again ran away leaving him in that empty house, using my poor excuse of a job as a gateway. I did feel bad for leaving him, which is why I kept his lighter with me as a form of a reminder, for all the times I’d lived under the darkness of his shadow.

I blew a circular shaped puff out my rolled down window and watched it expand before disappearing. The vehicle line had finally started to move and as my mustang roared forward, a familiar wave of dread washed over me. It’s been so long, but I still wasn’t ready to finally stand on equal grounds with him. Even though he was the one dying, I still seemed to be at the receiving end of his pity, in the form of a dinner.

 “Let’s eat together,” He had said over the phone a week ago, like he always did for the past few years and like always I had declined his offer until he had said the magic sentence, “I’m dying, Metanio, I’m dying.”      

“Aren’t we all?” I had covered up the awkward silence with a little humor, as I tried not to ponder on the way he said my name ‘Metanio’.

“It’s lung cancer,” He had said and for the first time in a while, I felt like I couldn’t breathe.

“Please come over,” He had said not minding my long silence, and I had replied with a quick ‘okay’ as I allowed the whole thing to sink in my brain.

That’s when I quit smoking.

Not out of worry for my health, but out of anger. Even death chose to follow him first over me. There’s this tiny voice in my heart which would occasionally remind me that ‘He doesn’t deserve to die this way,' and I’d tune that voice out and pretend to go on with my daily life. Even now, as I drove, I tried to tune everything out for as long as I could. As long as I- could, but as the familiar drive way came into vision with the small house and porch, I unconsciously held my breath.

My mustang came to a halt with a loud noise, announcing the entire neighborhood that I was there. I transiently closed my eyes and muttered a couple of curse words under my breath and I instantly felt better. Once I felt ready, I opened the driver’s seat door and jumped down on to the dry soil of the suburbs and turned around to look at my childhood. The house definitely got a whole lot smaller.

As if on cue, the front door opened and an unfamiliar older man stared at me. I glanced sideways at my own greyed away reflection from one of the broken windows of our house before walking towards the porch. I tried my best not to stare at him too much as I walked towards him. Had he always been this short? I wondered.

“You came,” He says with a frail smile and I had a small urge to pull him into a hug and pat his back, but I don’t.

“I came,” I say to him instead, as I followed him inside behind his slow controlled gait. The house smelled like him, or maybe he smelled like the house; old, moist with a touch of mint and musk.

“This place hasn’t changed much.” I say looking around as my eyes land on the portrait of the two of us on the day he graduated from a local collage. On the very same day, I had won a quiz competition at school, but it was nothing like his graduation, so I had decided to keep it to myself.  

“I wasn’t sure whether you’d actually come so I placed the food in the fridge,” He says as he went in the direction of the kitchen while I stared at his hunch back shoulders. “I’ll heat them up.” He added. I wondered whether he made everything up about him being sick and all, as continued to stare at his lightly swaying body. Aging has definitely caught up to him.

“Okay.” I say as I contemplated whether or not to go and help him with whatever it was he had to do in the kitchen.

After a small sigh, I follow him all the way to the back of the house, since the faster we finish this meal, the faster I could leave. The house was starting to feel a little suffocating.

“You don’t have to,” He says and yet he hands me a warm curry dish with which my nostrils flared up at in recognition.

And as he started to heat five more dishes one by one, my salivary glands were already at its job. All of the dishes were my favorites- I mean, his favorites. Midway between heating the dishes and arranging the dining table, he started to cough abruptly. Not long after, he coughed out a massive ball of blood on to his palm, and I didn’t know what to do.

“This is normal don’t worry,” He says as I continued to stare at him, who calmly pulled out a handkerchief from his old button down thin shirt’s pocket and wiped his hands clean. It was the same shirt he had worn for our mother’s funeral. I guess it's all he has.

“Don’t give me that look,” He says startling me as he placed the blood soaked handkerchief by the side of the sink with a leaking tap. I made a metal note to call a plumber to get it fixed.

“What look?” I ask him.

“That pitiful look,” he says, “I can’t live on forever at the receiving end of your pity. Don’t worry, I won’t die just yet.”

And I just stared at him for some time. “I don’t pity you,” I heard myself say, “I’m worried about you, but I don’t pity you, like you do me.”

“I never pitied you, Metanio. I am simply proud of you,” He says with another one of his classical smiles, and I wonder whether what he was saying was the truth. “Always have and always will be.” He added.

“Even mom used to regret not being able to tell you enough of how proud you made her feel,” He takes a deep breathe in, “Remember how she cooked all of this for you, the day you won the quiz?”

“No, she made them for your graduation,” I say stubbornly. My brain refused to acknowledge anything he was saying. At the back of my head, I was wondering how she knew that I had won the quiz. Did she see my certificate or did my teacher call her? I'll never know the answer in this life. A wave of regret washed over me, much more stronger than any of such previous waves.

“I don’t even like to eat any of these as much as you do. That portrait was my grad gift.” He continues with a shrug, without minding my spaced out expression.

“She used to say how much you took after her, and you know how she wasn’t good with words right?” He runs his hand through his grey hair, which were in multiple small isolated islands on his partially bald shining scalp. “That’s why she taught me how to make all of this, so that I could convey her feelings to you.” He chuckled lightly before looking up at me, “I guess now that I’m dying I finally feel obliged to.”

I continued to stare at him while he stared back at me.

“I need to go for a smoke,” I say, my throat felt like it had been rubbed over by a sandpaper. I needed time to clear off my head and arrange my thoughts. I pulled out the cigarette box which I had habitually tucked inside my trouser pockets and searched for the lighter.

“I have one,” He says reaching for his worn out trousers’ pocket and pulling a lighter out.

“Thank you,” I say to him for the first time with a small smile.

“My pleasure, Matanio.” He smiles, and I no longer think that it’s out of pity.

Come to think of it, I’ve never really thanked him for always being there for me, even when I refused to be there for myself.

And this time I'll be there for him.

This time I won't run away when he needs me the most.

I'll make sure that the lung cancer would regret chosing a golden man like him over me.

With a sigh I throw my cigarette into the sink and watch how the tap water ran over it drop by drop, before drowning it as a whole. I could feel his stare on me as I recalled of all the times he’d said, “Smoking is bad for your health Matanio,” back when I used to stubbornly smoke in front of him.

“The food’s getting cold,” He says after a moment of silence between us with just the sound of the running tapping water, and I could sense something close to approval in his voice.

"Let's eat," I say.

I followed him towards the dining table, placed at the far corner of the small living room. He sat on his usual seat, leaving an empty chair and plate for mother. With a little hesitation I sat on the same old chair which used to constantly made me feel like the teenager I was, with a fragile self-esteem and tall ego, but now I felt nothing more than gratification and hunger.

He begins to say a small prayer like we always did back then, with his hands pressed loosely together and eyes closed as tightly as he could, while I tried to paint a portrait of his peaceful expression in my head.

“Amen,” I add when he reached the end, and he looked up at me, his hands slowly came to rest on his lap.

I felt like he had something else to say, before we ate the food that waited to be devoured. The alien, but familiar smell of my favourite dishes were stimulating all my earthen systems, but I could wait. His lips parted and smacked against each other in hesitation.

"What is it?" I ask with an edge of impatience in my voice.

He reached into his trousers' pocket again and pulled out a small book. "I saved all the extra money you sent us, thinking you'd need it someday," he says, "Like I said, mother was very proud of you." He pushed the savings book towards me. "Spend this for yourself. I'm sure things weren't easy for you."

As his voice echoed in my ears, a stinging sensation spreaded through my eyes followed by my lips tasting salty. I didn't need to be a genius to know why. And once again the dire urge for another puff was back strong, with my index and thumb trembling in need to twist the familiar cylinder between them. I've never felt such a strong pull towards smoking before, maybe because I never truly quit it. I use my trembling hand to wipe the warm liquid that kept being pulled down by gravity along my cheek bones.

"The urge to smoke will disappear once we start eating," he says with a wide confident smile. His deflated cheeks stretched end to end, almost reached his hairy earlobes. I loved how he always knew what to do in every situation.

Was it because he was the older one?

"Let's eat." I say to him, after gulping down the snowball of saliva that had been formed from the tears that had gone down the wrong tunnel.

My eyes followed up his wrinkled face and paused once it landed on his dark orbs. I stared into them, the eyes of the one man I had adored since forever, and all I could see was immense love directed at me.

After all, I'm sure I loved him more.

I can't believe it took me this long to finally admit it.