Where The Smoke Goes

It started with a cigarette.

He never smoked before. Said it reminded him of his father’s anger, the kind that clung to walls long after the shouting stopped. The kind you couldn't scrub out of curtains or memories. But that night, he lit one anyway.

He stood under the flickering streetlight outside my apartment, the smoke curling around his fingers like it belonged there. His eyes were calm, distant, as though he’d already left and just forgot to take his body with him.

“Just one,” he said. “Then I’ll quit.”

I laughed. He had always been like that. Starting and stopping. Picking things up only to set them down halfway through. Sketchbooks filled with half-drawn faces. Notebooks scribbled with unfinished poems. Me.

But that next morning, he was gone.

Not in the usual way people vanish. There were no packed bags, no goodbye letter, no clues. His shoes were still lined up by the door. His coat still draped over the armchair. His favorite mug was half-full of coffee on the kitchen table—still warm.

Even his phone was on the counter, screen glowing with unanswered messages. Mine included.

I searched the apartment for hours. Called his name as if he might answer from under the bed, or from the back of the wardrobe like a child hiding during hide-and-seek. But all I heard was silence, so thick it pushed against my ears like water.

I called the police. Filed a report. They looked around, asked questions. "Did he talk about hurting himself?" one officer asked casually, like it was something people just did.

“No,” I whispered. But then again, he never talked much about anything real. He let his sadness out in thin slices—songs he never shared, sketches I found in the trash.

Friends offered theories, most of them half-hearted and too easy.

"Maybe he just needed space.”

“He’s probably at a friend’s place.”

“You sure he didn’t leave you?”

Each theory felt like a blade. Clean cuts, all missing the truth.

I knew him. I knew the weight in his chest when he talked about the world feeling too loud. I knew the way his fingers tapped a rhythm on his knee when he was trying not to cry. I knew he carried sadness like an extra organ—unseen, but always working.

Weeks passed. Then months.

No sign. No answers. Just a space where he used to be.

I stopped looking for him out in the world. I started finding him in the cracks. In the silence between songs. In the spaces between my thoughts. I would wake up at 2 a.m. certain I heard the door creak open. I would walk into the kitchen and swear I smelled smoke.

One night, I dreamt of him.

He stood at the edge of a lake under a sky too wide and too dark to be real. He looked younger, lighter. There was a bench behind him, and when I sat, he said nothing. Just handed me a cigarette.

I didn’t smoke. But in the dream, I did. And it burned slow.

“Why did you leave?” I asked.

“I didn’t,” he said. “I just disappeared.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“No,” he said, with a strange, tired smile. “One is a decision. The other just... happens.”

I woke up crying.

Not because I missed him. But because for the first time, I understood.

Some people don’t run away. They dissolve.

They unravel in front of you. Piece by piece. They become quieter, smaller, harder to reach—until one day, they’re gone and you’re left staring at the outline of who they were, trying to make sense of a shadow.

I stopped waiting after that.

I gave away his books. Donated his clothes. I kept one thing—a lighter, old and scratched, the kind he once used to burn through pages of his own bad poetry.

Now and then, when the ache returns, I walk to the park near our old place. There’s a bench where I sit. Same as in the dream. I light a cigarette.

Just one.

I don’t do it because I want to start. I do it because I want to remember. Because I like to watch where the smoke goes.

It curls upward, always upward, never in a straight line. It disappears slowly, like memory. Like him.

And I sit there and wonder: Did he vanish into the world, or into himself?

And does it matter, really?

Because some people don’t leave.

They simply stop being here.

And the rest of us are left behind—watching smoke trails disappear into the sky.