Our Chantex Assignment was to write a good bye letter...... here you go...
Good bye my friend good bye….. Friend….Why do I think of you that way…..well, you helped to calm me down, or did you? I know that I did not like the panic I felt when I couldn’t find my lighter or when you were not available to me or when I couldn’t have you. I remember being eleven and starting with you…. You allowed me the opportunity to hang with the popular kids… or did you… funny thing is I still don’t hang with the popular kids and even if I did …. They don’t smoke…. You took cheerleading away from me because I was too stubborn to admit that I could get by without you. Seems like now you are a stigma…. Something that everyone wants to get away from. By saying goodbye to you I am saying hello to me…. And I like me…. I am proud of me for trying and succeeding. I am strong. I will not go back. I do not miss having to leave my child sit in a hospital bed with his daddy while I went out to smoke. I don’t miss the fact that you made me miss out on a lot of things by going out to smoke. I was so tired when I had you as a part of my life. I had no energy. I had no strength. Damn you you took away my mother and yet I still wanted you around. I don’t want my son to say the same thing.
I guess you could say that I used you also. I used you to avoid things. As my excuse for how I could handle life or as my excuse for how I could avoid life. Sometimes my memory stinks…. I wonder if that is a side effect that you left me. Years ago when I was younger I said that Mom had COPD because she had Asthma and that maybe it was a side effect from being in an Iron Lung from having Polio. You know what…. Mom had COPD because she was a smoker. And while I was blessed to have her a lot longer than I thought, you took her. Heck, you took my childhood away. With Mom being disabled due to smoking it was up to me to take care of the family. And then when I no longer had to struggle with that then I had to work to be able to afford you rather than just going to college like a regular teenager would have.
No longer will I allow you to take from me. I cannot prevent the damage that I allowed you to do to my life, or perhaps the fear that you left some terrible disease behind. But I cannot allow you the chance to do anything further to me. I hate what you have done to me. I hate what you have done to my family. I will never allow you to treat me this way again because I will never allow you to be a part of me again. Goodbye you evil, cruel thing. I hope one day they lock you up and throw away the key so no one else has the chance in the future to be exposed to your type of friends ship.
