Prologue

The air always filled with smoke around him, it was funny to see him light up a camel crush as we huddled together on the cement floor. It was so cold under my backside but I didn't care. I was high and it felt good. The strumming beat of Cigarettes After Sex moved through the the fog of his own cigarette smoke. It was so typical... He was so typical, with his unbrushed hair and wrinkled cargo pants that always made him effortlessly cool. He was so cool.

And I was, well, me.

Unkept in the deranged way.

The braids that I hurriedly tied throughout my hair were beginning to unravel. I didn't care. The hum of Greg Gozalez was enough to lull me into a love so deep and unfamiliar that it could only be my first love.

He was dead the next day.

In the same spot I left him in, surrounded by erratic poetry and shredded canvases. I would never know the comfort of those cement floors and they would never yield his warmth again. There was no note, only the dismembered lines of pleas to an unknown god and ethereal dreams of a girl with braids tangled through her hair. The shrouded figures he always painted when he got high were in pieces on the floor, killed by their own creator.

He came back to me at times.

It was the beginning of seeing everything.

I would feel the brush of his hand along my cheek as I thrashed out of a nightmare, then I would smell the cigarette smoke as I padded through my house. No one--not even me--smoked cigarettes. My journals began to be splattered with faint snippets of slant rhymes and heavily inked hearts broken by ink splotches.

I knew it was him.

trigger warning: death, mysterious death, fake suicide