Smoke Where Your Name Should Be

I lit a cigarette, not for the taste—but to remember the warmth of someone who’s no longer mine.

“Still Your Best” – Giveon

I light another cigarette— not because I’m addicted to the burn, but because I keep looking for pieces of you in the ashes. Because I keep hoping the smoke knows how to find you when I no longer can.

They said time would dull it— this aching, endless echo of you— but the truth is, some goodbyes don’t know how to end. They hang, like secondhand smoke in a room that once held laughter, in lungs that only remember how to breathe in your presence.

I whisper into the flame like it could carry a message to you: Come back. Even if just for a moment. Even if just to say you don’t miss me the way I miss you. Even if you’ve moved on— I still need to hear it from your lips, not from the quiet.

The cigarette burns between my fingers— the closest thing I have to touch, to warmth, to you. And I beg the glow to last just one second longer. Because when it fades, you feel even farther. And I am not ready to be farther from what we never finished.

I ache in places I didn’t know could hurt— in the back of my throat where your name still tries to form, in the pit of my stomach where memories churn like smoke rings too fragile to hold.

I miss you in every way a person can miss someone they never fully had. Not just in the nights, but in the mornings where your absence wakes me before the sun. In the coffee that doesn’t taste right anymore. In the empty space beside me that still dents as if your body left a memory behind.

I talk to shadows now— whispers shaped like you, replies I invent to keep from unraveling. I ask the silence if you think of me too. If your chest still tightens at 1:47 AM when my name crosses your mind like a cold wind through an open window. Do you fight it? Do you welcome it? Or do you forget it the moment it comes?

I am begging time to be kinder. I am pleading with the universe to let me turn back just one page. To write you back in. To say what I didn’t. To do what I should’ve. To kiss you slower. To stay longer.

My hands shake— not from the cold, but from everything I’m holding inside that has no place to go. So I press it into tobacco and paper, and I light it, watching the fire consume what I never had the courage to say out loud.

I miss you.

Not just in passing. Not just in nostalgia. I miss you like a prayer that goes unanswered. Like a song that cuts deeper with every listen.

I miss you like my body misses air when the smoke clings too long— choking, dizzying, slow.

Each inhale is a plea: “Come back.” Each exhale is a surrender: “But I know you won’t.”

And maybe that’s what hurts most. Not the leaving. Not the silence. But the knowing— that you’re out there breathing fine without me.

Meanwhile, I sit here on the windowsill, flicking ash onto memories trying to forget the taste of your name.

But forgetting you feels like erasing a part of my spine. I can’t stand without it. I can’t move forward if it means leaving you behind.

So I hold on to smoke, to flame, to shadows. To a version of you that maybe never existed, except in the space where my chest caves in.

I tell myself this is the last cigarette. The last thought. The last poem. The last ache.

But I know it’s a lie— the kind I tell to survive. Because you were more than a chapter. You were a whole book I wasn’t finished reading.

And maybe you were never mine to keep. But God, how I begged the story to end differently.

I don’t know if you ever think of me, but I hope— when the wind smells like smoke, or when a sad song plays quietly in the back of a crowded room— I hope something stirs in you. Even just a flicker. Even just enough to miss me, too.

Until then, I’ll be here— lighting the next one, whispering your name into the flame, and watching it vanish into smoke where your mouth should’ve been.