You were hiding like I did when I found you. By accident. We were never meant to be crossing paths at every point, but that day, perhaps we were. You might have called it fate, but it hardly felt like it. Not when I was on my way home and you were running away from it.

The alley contained the memory of you ducking behind your jacket—one you have always worn as if you could not be parted from it—and me hearing the familiar clicks and the spark of flames after. Then came the plumes of silent fog, creeping towards the air like an insolent offering to the gods who never listened. Sometimes I wonder if it is the only trace of you the alley had left. Just you and your secret stash of cigarettes in your glove. Just you...and me.

When you looked up, I saw your face fall. This was not the side of you that you wanted me to see. Not now. Not when you thought you had everything in the world to prove. But you did not. You and I—we have nothing to say. And you made it clear the moment I joined you in the darkness.

"Not that I care," I said, tightening my hold on the strap of my backpack. "But what are you doing here?"

Maybe it was because of pity or something more twisted, but I snatched the stick from your mouth and stuck it in my own. Were you surprised? I would never know. Because like everyone in this world, I was too lost on my own to find you on yours. I could only wonder what went on in your mind as I inhaled a hit still full of your warmth. It burned. Like how you burn me. Maybe it had turned me to ashes before your eyes, but it also made me whole.

It made me complete.

At that moment, I understood why you escape to this crude imitation of your hell. Of your reality. I understood, even while knowing nothing of what it was to the letter. I know, because no one would be losing themselves, breaking themselves to the point of violent but quietly sane rebellion like the way you do. No one. Maybe except me.

Part of the words of yours that faded in my memory was your answer to the only question I bothered asking you. Perhaps there was never an answer, because like me, you thought it would be better off unsaid. But your words were the only ones which will remain long after you were gone. You should have known that then like you knew it well enough to have told me. Because it makes you a hypocrite when you force me to live by it.

"You should go home," you said long after I had fallen silent and our conversation took away your reason for being with me and I, with you. "You can't be seen with me, remember?"

I did. I do.

"We're not in school. Know the difference," I answered, taking one last swig of your sweet but flaring vice. "You can do whatever you want with me outside those gates. No one can see us, and no one should care."

Why did I say that? I wish I knew, like how I wanted to know how they came across to you. Was it the start of our downfall? If so, why did you laugh? Why did you throw your head back as if you already knew what would happen and looked forward to seeing me live through it?

Are you watching now? Have you always been watching, like how you never took your eyes off of me whenever you pass the fire escape?

The last question I will ask you now would be: do you enjoy it?

I feel like you do, like you enjoy watching me squirm as you take back the cigarette that was rightfully yours and blew your sin close to my face. It was intoxicating and irritating. Like you. So, so much like you whenever you find me on the landing, whenever you pick up everything that has fallen from my lap, whenever you tilt your head back and look at me as if I was the only thing your eyes were capable of seeing. The way your sun would hit your eyes and bring out the colors I never knew existed. You were a vice I could never hope to quit.

And in that dim alley, as you smiled at me with your eyes telling me nothing should change even though we have this now between us, you had one last card up your sleeve. "I care," you said with your voice smooth but your tone grating. "You, of all people, know you won't get an answer when you won't give yours."

"Fair enough," I remember replying. "You have your life. I have mine. Let it stay that way."

And you agreed. You could not bear having a crack in your image. You could not afford to destroy the one thing going well in your life, the one thing I realized too late were those brief encounters in the hallways, the smiles you threw my way, and the pockets of eternity we shared when we thought no one looked for us in our messed up fantasy.

I would never ask another question about you. Because you are a hypocrite, especially with the words you utter and the words you let me hear. You are a hypocrite, and I do not go out of my way to say I am too.

I am a hypocrite when I say I do not care about you.