Dear Reader

Apologies, for I smoke quite frequently. It is a coping mechanism I picked up, unsurprisingly, on long waning Parisian nights. With a man I called my lover. He would hand roll us “the finest tobacco from Belgium” and we would laugh too loud late night in the narrow streets. After long dinners in idyllic Le Quartier Latin, we would smoke and wander. He would hold me by my waist and gently wedge the stilettos of my heels out of the old cobblestone. Nosing my hair, whispering dirty thoughts in my ear in French "j'ai vraiment envie de toi", gently caressing the space behind my ears – I believed truly in his need for me. In the way our bodies collided, how our breath turns into song, the conversations that keep us up until the birds announce sunrise.

He is smoke. And I a flame.

Desire is too delicate of a word to describe what we had between us.

It would be a cliché to tell you that my lover and I had something indescribable. Every woman deeply entrenched in love would tell you the depths she would go to for a love this right. She is lost, star struck, yearning for that feeling that she remembers. She is chasing the idea of a man that she has created, one she wants to believe in, even if her lover is nothing like that. Nothing is stronger than a woman and her faith. Don’t dare remind her that she lives amongst selfish mortals, that he is not the figment she has conflated into eternal love.

She might douse you with gasoline and set you aflame.

We were kinetic, celestial bodies on a destined collision path. A slow, majestic burn that would make the cosmos cringe with a furious jealousy. Tell me how we wouldn’t set the world on fire, either by accident or damned purposefully.

Perhaps that is why I still smoke, on much harsher, colder nights in New York City. How the burn hurts me like he did, how deliciously his smoke wrapped tightly around me, how he filled me with an ashen warmth. A need so bad, that hurt so good. "J'ai vraiment envie de toi." I need you.

He is smoke. And I a flame.