Misplaced Monologues: "Abandoned"

Abandoned.

Is it worse for a parent to leave, or to die?  Either way, it's a form of abandonment.  I don't mean freak accidents, plane crashes, murders.  If someone chooses, from the moment they breed offspring, to do something clearly detremental to put them in the express lane toward the end of their life.

My father was a smoker.  Probably also a midnight toker, from what I've heard, but it wasn't that type of smoking that took him down.  You can read goverment and independent studies that show things of an alternative nature show little to no harm.  Not the same goes for the effects of tobacco, and it really pisses me off.  Like, so much.  Like, why is that girl leaving the party 'cause of the cigarette smokers?

It's fucking awful.  I re-live his death constantly when anyone that I even begin to care about picks up a cancer stick.  It hurts and does not compute.

For some background, I'm a pot smoking athiest.  Love animals but I eat some of them, never litter but I drive a car, always positive but I have some hang-ups.  I can't see past the cigarettes, or cigars.  Or dip.  The tobacco.

It feels like a very real choice for my father to have abandoned me, had a decision to make the minute I arrived and chose himself first.  Any parent who smokes tobacco is committing a near-felony, IMHO.  Shit is no longer about you when your skeet creates another human.  Fact.

And it makes me feel alone.  All I could know, the stories I miss, the support I do not have.  It makes me enraged.  I was second choice to a person who chose to give me life.  Second choice to a drug that gives little to no return, drains your pockets and isolates you.  It burns me that my life and childhood was fractured because he couldn't make the choice to man up.

From cigarettes, to the patch, to cigars: he never dropped the habit.  People accept it, let it go.  No one looks at you and says, "This will kill you, without a doubt."  Maybe not true for a lucky few, but for the majority, their fate is fairly set if they cannot set it down.

So my life is missing something I can never regain, and it's sad, but mostly I'm pissed.  Pissed at his choices and his lack of regard, for himself, his wife and for me.

Abandoned.  That's precisely what it is.