“You know,” she laughed, “I used to think you had some sort of gift when it came to me.”
I raised a quizzical eyebrow. “What are you talking about?” I asked her with a sort of snide snicker and an eye roll for these types of things she’d say sometimes.
“I’m serious,” she said. “I don’t know. I just used to think you had some sort of X-ray vision or something. You just always used to seem to see past my bullshit, all the mirages I put up for people. You just seemed to see past that and stuff. It was just like you had radar or something. I don’t know, it just always seemed like you saw past it and knew how to get me to let down that shit.” She blew out thin smoke rings.
“Oh? Why was all that in the past tense, then? What about now?” I looked straight ahead at the snow that was falling swiftly in fast little flurries.
She took a long drag and blew out a jettison of foggy breath and nicotine. She shrugged. “What about now? I used to think—doesn’t matter. I just realized I was wrong. That’s all. No one’s gifted, okay? No one sees past it—or, or maybe they used to but they can’t anymore. Maybe X-ray visions can only see past so much. Lines of sight always cease to exist at some point. You just don’t see it anymore, and that’s okay. It was wrong of me to expect shit from anyone in the first place, even from you.”
Those words resonated with me. Even from you. I had let her down. There was truth to her words: she was my blind spot. I got all jumbled up when it came to her. It wasn’t always like that, though. I mean, sure, she’d always confused me. She had too many damn layers to just peel them all away, she was just very complex. But I used to see past her guises most of the time. Maybe she’d gotten worse, or maybe I did, or maybe I’d put up layers, too, and I couldn’t see through our walls combined. I pulled out a new pack of cigarettes and lit one up. Smoking had a way of making the cold go away sometimes, or so it seemed.
She looked over at me. “Hey, twins,” she said, holding out an unwrapped pack of cigarettes. “We can start them together, see who smokes more.” She winked, as we both knew the answer to that one. She flipped her pack’s lid open and turned a cigarette over before picking one out and lighting it.
“Why do you do that?” I asked, nodding to her hands, white were turning white from the cold.
“Hmm?” she murmured, the newly lit cigarette dangling from the corner of her smirk. Sometimes stray strands of her hair fell in such a way that I was sure it would ignite on the ends of her ever-present smoking hazards. I nodded toward the open pack in her hands. “Oh, that? The cigarette thing? Here,” she reached out and took my box, selecting a cigarette and turning it upside down. “There. You turn one over for every new pack and save it for last. Then, when you finish the pack, you make a wish on the upside down one before you smoke it.” She handed the box and I looked down at it.
“Where’d you learn that from?” I asked. She always had these weird rituals and explanations and little invocations of hope that contrasted so much with her perpetual existentialism. Or maybe that was simply a harbinger of a multidimensional person, perpetually confused by a soul with more facets than the Hope Diamond. She was so damn complicated but I loved her, I loved her for every little part that composited her, every flaw and perfection and all that was in between. And maybe I never did really see her, but I always felt her. Always. And maybe that was the beauty in human nature, that the only real ecstasy was the empathy brought from understanding and being understood or misunderstood together. Perhaps that was the same driving force that allowed people to believe in concepts as ludicrous as love. Perhaps that was the driving force behind the curtains of humanity, behind the perpetual show we put on for ourselves was an interconnectedness of billions of empathetic souls. So I put the pack in my pocket and watched the snow falling thick and fast amidst the dying smoke from her last wish and the new cigarette she’d lit to accompany her hazy thoughts.
