Cigarettes and leather jackets. Leather jackets and cigarettes. You’d often associate them together, rarely thinking one can be without the other, not believing one can be without the other. But it is, in fact, possible. A leather jacket can lay alone in a solemn chair, not a lighter or cigarette inside or close by. A pack of cigarettes can be kept in the pocket of a bag, a leather jacket not being something owed or worn. But society has made you believe that if a person wears a leather jacket, they’ll have a cigarette hanging from their mouth, killing their lungs. Or if a cigarette has been smoked, they’ll be putting their leather jacket on despite the summer heat.
Although society had taught us that this is the stereotype, I had spent so long believing against it and all stereotypes society had concocted that invade our brains and change our perspective on the world we see. That was until cigarettes and leather jackets, leather jackets and cigarettes were two things he owned. In the solemn pockets of his leather jacket was an empty lighter and the mourning of missing the pack of cigarettes that would usually make themselves at home. He had stolen one of mine, which turned to more after my constant offering, my need of constant offering, and I grew used to his owning of a leather jacket and a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. Forcing me to believe in societal stereotypes.
Until I was proved wrong. I knew not to believe in societal stereotypes, I had forced myself not to believe in societal stereotypes, but I had done it anyway and unexpectedly, he was the one to prove me wrong. Like every character in a book, we’re all full of detail with pages upon pages to describe them to the best of the author's ability. He is exactly one of those characters. He has more history than you would know, more facts than you could imagine and more characteristics than you would believe.
Upon expectations, he and I are people who you look at and instantly feel as though you know them just by the way they look, talk, dress or behave. I know that from experience and I’m sure he does too. We sat and read each other’s pages, analysed each other’s dialect and examined the way each other walked, as well as taking in the way the other dressed. One was able to put it into words that fitted them and the other able to express it with their voice.
Shakespeare had said ‘be who you are, not what the world wants you to be’ and I had never seen anyone understand that more than him. The world wanted him to be more from stereotypes that toxicated their brains, how they wanted a dark character because he wore leather jackets and survived on cigarettes. But he was himself; he loved with force and determination, he cared for all the people that were around him, and he had never put his own self first. He was your typical ‘lover, not a fighter’. He made me learn to do the same, be myself out of the dark corners of the library, writing about the person I was and becoming.
Oscar Wilde had said ‘be yourself; everyone else is already taken’, it could be found laughable from my perspective because I found myself wanting to be him. His intoxicating confidence and the ease in making people want to be with him or be him. He’s the type of person you want to be, the type of person you want to be with. Cigarettes and leather jackets. Leather jackets and cigarettes. Something that gave him characteristics that went against the stereotypes of society because he had the urge to prove that he was never what you expected, even after you believe you had managed to gather some sort of knowledge, he was also unexpected.
But we are all in fact different. Different characteristics, different features, different purposes. We all live for different reasons that only we know, that only we would be able to understand and acknowledge to their full extent. I was curious about his reason, and I’m sure he was of my reason. But we’re both as stubborn as the other, despite our curiosity, and we’d never express those reasons because perhaps there’s other reasons for why we keep secrets about them, reasons that sometimes we didn’t want to admit to ourselves. We all have our reasons for secrets, and that is why we keep them.
Cigarettes and leather jackets. Leather jackets and cigarettes. Both things that can cause an addiction. You can grow to crave the choking scent of cigarettes that drown your lungs and make you shake for the urge of another like you need it more than you need oxygen. You can grow cravings for the loving scent of leather and the way it can stick to the skin, becoming his natural scent. It’s intoxicating, addicting to the extent that you can’t survive without it and there’s no way of coming out from the addiction, it’s worse than the addiction to cigarettes or alcohol. I lost my mind trying to figure out how to avoid the craving for the scent until I allowed it to absorb me and now I’m addicted to cigarettes and leather jackets.