Felix taught me how to smoke. During every civil two word conversation we had, he would light a cigar, then glance off, pressing his fingers onto the suede pads of his suit. He always looked so ridiculously perfect that it disgusted me- even when he was smoking, he was perfect, to much of the extent that I was not so. By no means was he fond of me for those few minutes every other week or month, but I was his replacement of a conversation piece when he paddled home, full of dread and reluctance. I could have been a clock or a lamp for all I knew, as he never acknowledged me by name nor waited for my reply even once. Sometimes he would reach out behind him and extend his arm out with a fresh cigar between his grinding fingers, grubbing for something that he chose to believe existed despite the impeccably impossible nature of that case being so. As much as I spited him under my breath, I remained silent when I picked it out with two fingers, and held the blunt between my seething teeth, trying not to inhale what reeked of his signature. I had never actually lit one up, so I was only faking my part until he was undoubtedly satisfied with my satirically defunct performance. More so than a sign of gratitude, my faux enjoyment of the cigar lodged within my mouth was an act of heathen revenge in which I was but a symbolically disabled statue of his being. I always stood behind him, trailing by enough steps so that he would not catch me in the corner of his eye if he leaned on the balcony railing. He never seemed to mind all too much, but I wish he had minded just a little. Nonetheless, it was unfair of me to lead myself on, for he had made himself explicitly clear that he had denied me as his son as much as I had began to deny him as anything more than some vessel in my lackluster creation. The distance keeping us apart was little, yet I felt that the more we repeated this routine, the further and further I was expected to stand from him as some sort of reconciliation for his kindness in accepting my presence in the first place. It was a rotten sort of feeling, and it was all I could ever focus on the older I grew and the more aware I was of the husky smell that lingered from my mouth. I loved him not, nor did I ever remember loving him. It was not the epitome of my teenage angst that I felt had ever pit us against each other, but rather the many years I had spent believing that I loved him, slowly reducing the meaning of the emotion for myself with blatantly artificial justifications: I loved him like everyone loved their fathers- I love him because he was my father- he was my father- I was expected to. The very last time that Felix brought me out to smoke was four days before he informally disowned me, and ten days before I died. By then, we had denounced each other enough to consider each other strangers with a similarly passionate hatred towards one another, so I was unpleasantly befuddled when he called me with a swig of his finger out to the balcony. I had not seen him since the end of May, and though I was utmost inclined to haughtily reject his gesture, I found myself on the balcony for one more uncomfortable encounter. As usual, he dropped a cigarette in my hand; I was sure that by then, he should have known that I had never actually smoked with him, or at all in my life, yet he had become so accustomed to his silent urging that it was simply a habit for him. He spoke of business again- figures that were higher than he thought they would be, colleagues that made him want to vomit, hours he had spent on a project that meant nothing more to me than a blubbering pool of noises and harsh consonants. But then, for the first and the last time, he turned to look at me. He stared at me for a long while, and then stared at the cigar between my teeth for another few minutes. I said nothing, mesmerized by his simple look that I had never seen. He sighed and almost laughed before he turned to look out at the view again, shuffling his hand in his suit pocket. When he finally withdrew a lighter, he twisted himself over to me and held it under the cigarette hanging out of my mouth. ” You have to light the damn thing to smoke.” I said nothing. With a flick of his finger, the flame shuttered and lit the tip of the blunt. The moment I was aware of the smoke, the cigarette fell out of my mouth and plopped onto the floor. We both watched it fall, and I wondered years later if he knew I had loved him once.