You wouldn’t love me if you knew anything about me.
Why should you care at all about someone like that, then? Someone who you know wouldn’t appreciate you for the things you are. Someone who can’t possibly be worth it. That’s not worth anything then.
Because I’d rather have the pretense of being loved for an illusion than to have nothing at all. That’s worth something to some people, you know.
Would it make sense for her to say that she wasn’t hooked on cigarettes but found the idea to be enticing? As in—she wanted to be addicted, so addicted she would die without consumption. The idea of needing something so badly that death was the only road to go because life without it was not quite so spectacular was incredibly morbid, but it was a wonderful thing at the same time because it also meant attachment.
Attachment. Grace knew none of it. Nothing about the word meant anything to her because she had never committed to such a term before. She had never experienced it. It was foreign, strange, deranged … which was why she wanted it. It was ironic, but in the most basic of terms, she was attached to the attachment of attachment. If she was to need nicotine, then she would come to depend on it. It would be a routine she would not be proud of but could say she had at all in her spontaneous lifestyle of impulsive non-commitments.
She wasn’t even committed to the title of her identity portfolio. Grace Kay sounded like the name of a talented, modest ballerina who had tea and scones in the afternoon with her exclusive circle of socialites. But this Grace Kay was neither talented nor modest. What potential she had in anything would be her boast of the day to anyone who would listen. She did take ballet lessons as a child but had dropped out after a few years because she was afraid her feet would turn out as ugly and deformed as her instructor’s. There was a clique she ran with but they had popcorn and soda for movie nights and went clubbing when they were feeling a bit more adventurous.
Sad to say, but the best way to put it was that Grace had no idea why she existed to live. It didn’t feel like she was living at all—never did. She just existed.
She had ten left in her pack of Marlboro lights. Where did the other ten go? This was a pack she had gotten just a few days ago. She looked around and found three cigarette butts on the ground, trimmed cleanly to the line indicated just below where the lips were supposed to hold. A fourth cigarette, newly brandished and unlighted for the moment, was between her fingers. She stared at the remarkable thing, wondering how it had gotten to such a place while she had been lost in time and thoughts irrelevant to anything and related to everything.
