I Walk the Line ♤ (gxg)

chapter 33: weeping willow

It was a bad habit.

Amongst many others, she had the bad habit of smoking cigarettes. She did not know why she kept smoking them. She could have easily tossed the pack of Marlboro 100's into the trashcan, along with her green transparent lighter, and felt no need to dig through the crumpled-up homework papers to retrieve the bad habit again. She did not quite like the lingering coat of musk that they left on her clothes after each smoke session. The bad habit, she felt, was seemingly written across her forehead, visible to each passing person with a decent olfactory system. French vanilla perfume never failed to halfway cover the scent. She wondered if those who knew her knew her scent as that—cigarettes and French vanilla.

Everyone had a scent, she reflected to herself as she felt the thick smoke fill her lungs until they burned and then hastily flee from between her chapped lips, almost as desperate for a sense of freedom as she was. Whether by perfume or their bad habits, everyone, no matter if they felt like the most unimportant person in the world, automatically earned some sort of significance at the very second of their birth—a scent.

She remembered her scent. It seemed to physically verify her tangible aura. Her scent was cherry Coke and cigarettes. The latter one was passed onto her, especially after she had been handed her first cigarette only three months ago. Three months was all it took for her to develop that bad habit, but it was not the first nor the only one she developed in that period of time.

Now she laid on the roof where she had smoked her first cigarette three months ago, and she glanced over at the full can of cherry Coke sitting on the concrete next to her, almost as if it were mocking her. A dull ache formed in her heart, a hollow, resounding ache that penetrated her deepest core. A sudden burning sensation in her fingers made her realize that the cigarette was burned to its very end, and maybe so was she.

♠

There were well over five hundred people at the funeral, the graveyard covered in people dressed in black, most of them having spade tattoos somewhere on them. There was no visitation, so August didn't even get to see Willow one last time.

Ronnie sat beside her, his bandaged head hung low as a preacher spoke, stood right in front of the coffin. August's nose moistened at both the icy January air and the tears falling constantly down her face. She felt Cornelia rub her shoulder, but she couldn't draw herself out of her mind. She couldn't even hear a word the preacher was saying.

At the end of the preacher's sermon, Ronnie sniffled before standing up and walking to the podium. August stared hard at the closed wooden coffin, her mind flashing with the memory of Willow's green eyes closing before she fell to the warehouse floor. She remembered her beautiful lips mouth to her that she loved her before the bullet tore her chest open. August pressed her eyes closed as she felt the dull ache in her heart reappear. It was the only thing she had felt the past couple of days.

"It goes without saying that whoever crossed paths with Willow in this lifetime, never met anyone else like her," Ronnie began, his voice shaky before he cleared it and continued meekly. "She was not just the leader of our gang. She was my best friend. She was the laughter resounding in all our ears. She was the life of all our extravagant parties—and, boy, the woman threw some parties."

A few laughs were heard in the crowd, and a few sniffles, but August could not laugh or smile. She just stared at the wooden surface of the coffin that held her lover and listened to Ronnie speak.

"She was a protector—an excellent one at that. I think each and every one of us has had our lives saved by Willow at least once. She cared about her gang, and every move she made was with our welfare in mind. She held so much power and composure. She always managed to stay calm during the storm whenever everyone else panicked, but whenever she was the storm brewing, everyone always shook with fear. She was stronger as one single being than all of us combined. She smart and quick as a whip, and when she struck, it always stung. But she wasn't just that. She was kind and caring and thoughtful. Those closer to her know that she would have taken a bullet for each and every one of us."