The Last Cigarette

The Last Cigarette

I sit on the balcony alone. The sun disappears behind the bare hill like an orange melting into brownish-green tea. I don't know why I’m thinking like this today – perhaps because my grandmother always said that the sunset is like a death that promises resurrection.

I lit a cigarette. The last from the pack. Maria had told me to quit smoking. "You’ll die," she said, and I laughed. Now she isn't here to scold me. Three months have passed. Three centuries. The smoke rises in curls, dancing with the July breeze. Warm, heavy, full of jasmine from Mrs. Stavroula’s tree downstairs. I always liked how Athens smells in the summer – gasoline, the sea coming from afar, souvlaki from the tavern on the corner. And fear. It smells of fear, too, if you know where to look.

What do I do now? The thought of Maria nudges me, wakes me up agonizingly every morning. It haunts me in my desolation like a beaten stray dog, stubborn. Maria was my constant. The compass of my poor heart. Without her, I am a ship sailing in rudderless seas.

I remember her hands. How they held the coffee cup every morning – those slender fingers, a little rough at the tips from working in the garden. "Hands betray your life," she told me. She was right. Mine are trembling now. When did I become so lonely?

The neighbor turns on the TV at the same time as usual.. I hear the news bulletin murmuring through the wall – something about a crisis, about fires in Evia, about politicians who tell lies like they are inhaling air and exhaling smoke. Nothing changes here. Everything changes inside me.

I look at the cigarette in my fingers. It burns slowly. Patient. It isn't in a hurry to become ash. I wish I hadn’t been in a hurry back then. I wish I had told her – before she left for the hospital that morning – how much I loved her. But I thought we had time. We always think we have time. Idiot.

The mobile phone rings persistently. It must be Eleni, her sister, I’m sure. I’m not picking it up now. What should I tell the poor woman? That I woke up today and forgot for two seconds that Maria was gone? That I reached out my hand to the pillow next to me and felt only cold? A biting cold that floods my bones with shivers?

Someone honks violently in the street..Children are playing with the ball in the square, shouting with joy. Life goes on, indifferent, like a cold river that doesn't ask if you want to go along.

The cigarette finishes, burning my finger. I'm so absent-minded.. I put it out in the clay ashtray she got me from Crete – blue ceramic, with a little fish painted on it. "So you remember the sea," she had said. As if I could forget.

Tomorrow, maybe I’ll buy another pack. Maybe not. Tomorrow, maybe I’ll find a reason to get out of bed. Maybe.