At 2:05 AM on February 5, 2005 I lost a lover and a friend.  We’d been together nearly fifty years.  We met at age twelve in the woods behind Richard Lanier’s house in Brooksville, Florida.  From that point forward, we were never far apart and we grew closer as time passed.

     At first our courtship was casual and irregular.  We had sweet and awkward clandestine trysts.  We were carefully secretive in my teens.  The meetings were often passionate and sometimes left me dizzy, reeling and breathless.

     We stepped boldly out of the closet at age twenty and had a forty-two year intimate relationship.  We were best friends, lovers and companions; through good times and bad, we were never apart.  On those few occasions when were separated, I would search in rainstorms, blizzards and in the wee hours of the morning to find my darling.

     I can’t keep this up. 

You’re thinking that my “companion” is human. 

My companion is my longstanding addiction to the nicotine in cigarettes.