Smoke

I didn’t see it at first, but having the chance of almost losing my life reality hit me. I’ve finally made the choice to stop. If I was going to live my dreams of becoming a writer, I had to stop. I have now realized that it is not just hurting me, but it is also hurting the one’s that I love the most. Fay. Fay is my grandmother. She was a writer herself. She was the one who taught me everything about writing. She always told me that writing about how you truly feel will fix all of your problems, or at least help them. And she was right, they did help my problems. It helped them all excepted for one at the time. My smoking. When I became 15, a sophomore in high school, I started hanging out with the wrong crowd. I was skipping school, smoking in the bathrooms, getting suspended all the time. You name it, I did it! And while I was leading my life down-hill I didn’t care about who got hurt in the process. Not my friends, not my grandmother, not my girlfriend, and definitely not my dad. My dad was a drug attic anyways, so I didn’t really care about what he thought. My grandmother said that after my mom died when I was two my dad couldn’t handle the pressure anymore, so he started doing drugs. My grandma didn’t want me to be around it, so she took me in. And that was when she taught me about writing. I have lived with my grandma ever since. She told me that’s why I started to act up when I was in school. Every time she saw me smoking on the back step I would come in and she would tell me that I should write about how I felt about smoking. I never felt like writing anymore, so I never listened. When I graduated from high school, surprisingly, I didn’t go to college. Instead I didn’t care about my life, and started to smoke more. Fay told me that I gave up on everything and that I should be ashamed of myself, but I didn’t. I have probably smoked 3 packs a day. Until the day when Fay went out grocery shopping and came back finding me passed out on the back step. She saw that I was barely breathing, so she rushed me to the hospital where they said I had lung cancer in my lungs from smoking. The doctor said that it was treatable, but not curable. When I came to my senses 6 days later, he told me that if I didn’t stop now I could be dead in a matter of 6 months. When I got out of the hospital and back home, Fay didn’t even talk to me. I knew I screwed up and the guilt was eating me alive. I just didn’t know how to really make it up to her. Then it hit me, I knew exactly what I needed to do. I struggled to sit up and get out of my bed. I grabbed the pen and paper that was sitting on my desk, and started to write. When I came down stairs Fay was sitting in her rocking chair watching the television. I handed her the paper, and while she read I saw this glimpse of joy on her face. She turned to me with water in her eyes and said it was my best one yet.