It's All I Can Do.

I sit. The voice at the front of the room drones on, the aesthetics of the novel, or something like that. I want to vomit. The smell of cigarette smoke is overwhelmingly reaching my nostrils, drafting upward from the girl in the baseball cap, directly behind. The girl who rarely shows. The girl who sits behind me texting on her phone. I can hear it. Click. Click. Click. I can't hear. I can't breathe. I think I'm going to be sick. Damn you, girl in the baseball cap. Maybe she doesn't understand. Maybe she doesn't recognize the consequences. Or, perhaps, she doesn't care. Well, I care.

I remember her, now lost, attempting to draw breath from the nose and mouth on her thin and sunken face. Her strength was robbed from her. It wasn't a choice. It wasn't a result of her life choices. I remember when her lungs starting filling with fluid, when it became hard to breath. She used to cough uncontrollably. Over. And over. And over again. Sleep was sometimes not even an option, not even in her chair, sitting straight up. She lost her ability to breath. She lost her ability to live. Hey, girl in the baseball cap, do you have a death wish?

I sit. The voice in my head resonates, asking one question. Why? Just a word. But, its complexities never ending. I will never know. I will never know why the girl in the baseball cap smokes. Why she skips class. Why she doesn't care. Even the little things I do know are built on assumption. An unfair judgement on my part. Perhaps I am wrong entirely. But, I still want to know why. Why smokers choose to risk an early death, purposely damaging their bodies. Maybe they have never seen what happens when a person's lungs stop working, when the person literally is left without any way to breathe... Maybe they should.

My professor is still talking. Novels. And passivity. Something about heteroglossia. I'll look it up later... Sometimes I just have to write it down. I don't choose when it happens. I don't control when the urge strikes me. I don't control when the words start filing into my head in perfect order. It just happens. Just like emotion happens. Just like the memories happen. One spark and I'm lost, removed from everything going on around me. All I can hear is the click. click. click. All I can smell is the smoke enveloping me. All I can see, is her.