Chapter Text
Prologue
My bench was occupied.
A man was sitting there, on my spot, soiling the wonderfully chapped wood with his existence. Or less man, more boyish figure in a massive brown coat with a collar covering everything except for a mop of dark purple-ish hair held together by a silver pin atop his head.
They seem to not have noticed me yet, hence the calm, rythmic puffs of smoke coming out from behind the oversized collar, cause of them being the cigarette loosely hanging in between his fingers.
I slide my own pack back into my jeans, the lighter still clenched tightly in my other hand with my thumb brushing over it's scuffed yellow body. I never liked that bench much anyway right? It's not that big of a deal. I can find a new spot to smoke basically everywhere else.
So I left.
If I had known that this scenario happening would cause me to sit crosslegged in the middle of my one bedroom apartment with three packs of unopened malboro reds in front of me, my lighter of seven years in pieces right next to them and my head in my hands, i would have chosen differently.
But I didnt.
So this is the story of what the actual fuck my mentally ill mind did to me when my bench just so happened to be sat on by a different ass.
Actually, scratch that.My therapist confirmed that I was a pathological liar in our last session, but hey, a bit of dramatic entrance never hurt anyone,did it?
The „different ass“ i mentioned didnt bother me all that much, I'm just not the most social person out there, so finding a different,smoke friendly spot to avoid any kind of human interaction in my break seemed alluring at the time.
I tried the staircase in front of the corner shop at Kennedy street, but the owner of said shop ended up calling the cops on me for nothing, and it ended in a four-mile sprint, asthma attack and leg cramps for the following week.
Who the hell has asthma and smokes everyday? Me. Obviously. Now back to the point.
It's a real shame, truly. The sun always hit right above my head due to the buildings, so my paleness would have stayed the same;as well as the happy tune coming from inside the nearby restaurant were nice additions to the smell of old hotdogs and popcorn coming from the very same shop that apparently did not want a teenager there.
But oh well, I shrugged that off and ignored my aching knee for the next few days, and tried to find more spots, preferably with less cops and more silence.
Guess what happened?
Nothing did. I went back to the bench a week later, fed up with peoples bullcrap and with a full pack of unsmoked cigarettes in my left jean pocket, the plastic wrapper putting a shiny cover to the photo of a hospital bed printed on the box.
With a last huff of anger I yanked the cigarette out of the strangers gloved hand.
My bench. Mine.