Where the Wind Goes

“Smoking is terrible for you.”
“A lot of things are terrible for me.” I sit down on the edge of my car, leaning against the hard metal, a cigarette dangling from my lips.
The man standing nearby looks at me with a half-smile. “That’s true. And you do a lot of those things.”
“I do my best.” I pull myself up onto the trunk of my car, inching my way to the rear window. I lie down and stretch my arms out, staring up at the sky. The hazy blue is covered by the long, swaying pine trees scattered around the parking lot.
I let out a long sigh. “I have all these songs playing in my head. Like I hear the music so distinctly and then in an instant it’s gone. It drives me crazy, I wish I had a way to record it. Like some mental tape recorder I could pop into my skull.”
The man laughed. “That would come in handy in more ways than one—like maybe you would start remembering my name if you had one of those. We’ve been working together for three months, and I’ve never once heard you call me by anything but ‘hey you.’”
“Yeah. It would probably have tons of uses.” I take a drag of my cigarette and as I exhale I watch the smoke dance and twirl around me, the wind picking it up and stealing it away, throwing it across the sky and infecting the air.
I feel the man poke my foot with his finger. “Are you falling asleep? Its only noon.”
“No, just closing my eyes for a second. How far do you think the air you exhale goes? Like in a minute, does the air you let out spread across a mountain, or does it just twirl right back around and sit with you for awhile?”
“Umm…I have no idea. I’ve never really thought about it before. That’s kind of umm…odd. Are you high or something?”
“You know what man, I’m always high.”
The man laughs, “What, like high on life?”
“No, not really.”
“Oh. Like weed?”
“Yeah I do like weed. Do you?”
“What? No, that’s not what I meant.”
“Alright.” I take another drag of my cigarette and as I exhale, I try to watch the tentacles of smoke as they spread out across the sky, slowly snaking up towards the blue ocean of the heavens and disappearing so quickly it was almost as if it was never there.
“Fuck.”
“What?”
“I can’t see where the wind goes.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”