He was pure. Not pure like snowflakes or cooing babies. He was pure like cocaine made from the finest cocoa leaves, ground into the softest paste, then cut into pristine white grains.  Sometimes when he came home he would smell like sour diesel marijuana and cigarettes. He would smile crookedly out from under his faded baseball cap and hide his eyes behind reflective Aviator sunglasses. He liked to drive down back roads and sing along to old country songs about drinking to forget. He used to sit next to his old record player and try to drown demons that had long ago learned to swim with whiskey and Hank Williams. He was a broken man with chapped lips and kisses that felt like being wrapped in silk and roses with the thorns still intact, and sometimes he told her that he loved her.

            She was never really sure where she stood with him. Some nights he would answer when she called and others she would tell his voicemail that she was worried. He liked to come over early in the morning without telling her he was coming and scoop her into the passenger’s seat of his truck bare-foot and in her pajamas. He would ruffle her hair and hand her a lit cigarette and some coffee and head out to wherever he intended to go. Sometimes he would leave her in her driveway without saying goodbye or the promise that he would see her again. Other times he parked his truck and went to lie down in her bed. He was a man who needed no invitation.

            Once he told her that he wanted to marry her one day, and she promised him a life-time of packed lunches and black coffee. He smiled while he shook his head, revved his truck and peeled out of her driveway fast enough to leave black marks on the pavement. She never mentioned it again. She used to drink his whiskey straight out of the bottle and he would kiss the taste off of her lips. It was nights like those that she would steal his baseball cap and whisper in his ear about how much she liked his cologne.

            He was always running away from her, and she never bothered to try and catch him. She knew he would never be gone for too long, and if he was he was on his way back. There were days when he would lift off on a cloud of smoke and float away in his own thoughts. Those were the days when she would stare at her reflection in his aviators and think for a moment that she might just be pretty when he was looking at her through half lidded eyes. He would kiss her and tell her that she tasted like cotton candy and make her promise never to love him. She would cross her fingers behind her back like a child and comply.

            He was a beautiful mystery made of worn leather and bottomless packs of Marlboro Reds. He was never the same person twice and she fell in love with him over and over again. He was more of a hobby than any sort of commitment, but he was her favorite hobby and he didn’t seem to mind that at all. She tried to write a poem about him once, but she couldn’t find words strong enough to begin to describe the feeling she got when he held her hand. Words only failed her when it came to him.

            When she fell asleep beside him it was bliss. He was warm comfort and she was cold and twitched as she fought the images behind her eyelids. She never woke up to find him beside her, but that was okay. She wasn’t the kind of woman a man woke up next to anyway. Sometimes he’d call her in the afternoon, already half-drunk and coughing into the phone. She would smile and listen to the story he had told his friends about her, and then laugh when his truck pulled into her driveway. He was never there for long, more like a breath of smoke than a man, but he was pure THC and she never hesitated to breathe him in and relax in the high.