Addiction
They were in his bed and she was in his T-shirt, in his arms. Her boyfriend thought she had spent the night with friends on campus. He was about to go outside for a smoke. She said, What does it feel like when you need a cigarette? There was a long moment while he thought. The smell of tobacco and nicotine was already on his breath when he sighed and listed the symptoms: He said, The first one feels amazing when you wake up and you have it straight away. He said, Sometimes it feels like anxiety, like you feel when you’re waiting for something that you’re really nervous about, and knowing that it won’t go away until you can get outside and light up. He said, Sometimes it’s like being hungry, or rather like an empty feeling in your stomach, and it’s as if there’s nothing else in the world that can ever satisfy you. He said, Your head starts to hurt sometimes when you’ve been too long without it. Maybe you get irritable, or depressed, or you feel like you’re losing your mind. He said, It’s this itching in your fingers like your hands need something to do every minute of the day. He said, It’s like everything is wrong all at once and the only way to set it right is to get that buzz again as soon as possible. He said, You’re not a smoker. I don’t expect you to understand.
Samantha Edmonds is the author of the chapbooks Pretty to Think So (Selcouth Station Press, 2019) and The Space Poet (Split/Lip Press, 2020). Her fiction and nonfiction appears in The New York Times, Gay Magazine, Ninth Letter, Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Rumpus, among others. A PhD student in creative writing at the University of Missouri, she currently lives in Columbia. Sam is the Fiction Editor at Doubleback Review.
