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It’s the comedown after a performance that always has Taylor wondering if she picked the right career. The lights and noises have left her with a pounding migraine, she feels sweaty and gross in a way that a dozen showers wouldn’t wipe away, and worst of all, she’s really fucking lonely. She glances at the clock and dares to imagine a different life for herself, just for a moment. She’s full from dinner and tucking her children into bed. There’s reruns playing on television, two glasses of wine on the coffee table, a ring on her finger, and the kind of comfortable routine she had run away from her entire life in pursuit of passion. It’s funny; what she had once considered the most boring and dreadful fate was now all she desired. The knowledge that you could never have something is sometimes the last puzzle piece in the realization that it could very well be all you ever wanted.
Six weeks. Forty days. One thousand hours. An eternity. It was all the same.
Time stopped when he left.
She’s changing into a comfortable plush bathrobe when she notices it. A half empty pack of cigarettes and a lighter in the pocket. She shudders at the intimacy of him wearing her robe after showering on her bus – she must have been busy rehearsing, or rushing to record something before the words and melodies escaped her mind – How did I miss this? What could I have possibly been doing that was more important than you? I promise, nothing was ever more important than you. Nothing will ever be more important than you. She tries to conjure up an image of him wearing it and fears she’s already forgetting the little things. The tattoo placements. The way he moves. She clings to this pack of cigarettes like a lifeline. It’s all the proof she needed that the love affair wasn’t just in her head. Opened, but not empty. Used, but with some life left. Would she always feel just like this?
She steps outside and looks around. There’s no one else in sight. It’s only after checking her surroundings repeatedly that she finally feels comfortable doing what she came out here to do. She brings the cigarette up to her red lips and lights it with her right hand. It’s hard not to cough at first. Breathe in. The scent instantly brings back a decade’s worth of hazy memories, playing quickly like a supercut in her mind. Breathe out. Flashes of watching him do this hundreds of times, entranced by the way the spark of the lighter illuminated his face, that beautiful face. Telling him over and over again that he should quit.
One of those times, he had smiled and rolled his eyes. “Maybe one day. After I’ve got a little one or something. I dunno.”
She was taken back by his candor. She wished she could crack his head open, take a look around inside, and watch their respective imaginary futures side by side to see if they lined up; if she had finally gotten it right. “If I were to have children, I couldn’t smoke during my pregnancy.”
“Yes, I believe that’s usually how it goes.” He had laughed.
“So how’s that fair? I can’t smoke or drink or do any of the things that you do for almost an entire year.” She regretted the words as soon as they left her mouth. She felt whiny, and girlish, and she hadn’t discussed children so casually with any other man. As a thirty-three year old woman, she was starting to feel the weight of her words; the ticking of a biological clock escalating into a bomb inside her chest; the future right around the corner and not over a distant horizon. There were moments she was so consumed by her love for him that she would have given him anything he wanted without even thinking twice. Truthfully, she wanted his children, with curls bouncy like his, and hers before she lost them to heat damage and time. Oh, time, her biggest enemy for so many reasons.
“Darling,” he took a drag, “you don’t do any of the ‘things that I do’.” He had thrown her words back at her, mocking her, but smiling in amusement. “And you shouldn’t. They’re bad for you.” And you're not bad for me?, she remembers thinking to herself.
The salty taste of her own tears pushes her out of this memory and back into the lonely, crushing reality that is the present day. She wipes her eyes with the sleeve of the bathrobe, breathing in the smell of smoke and his cologne mixed together. It was once just as close to his skin as she was. The kind of closeness she once longed so desperately to have with him, and finally knew, and lost all too quickly. The kind of closeness she'd return to over and over in dreams until the day she died.
She puts out her cigarette, looks up, and screams at the night sky. I love you, it’s ruining my life.