promises meant to be broken.

Disclaimer: By posting this blog I know I am putting this experience on blast, but I'd hope that whoever reads this will honor my request for privacy and discretion concerning this topic. With all due respect, I simply ask that whoever reads this handles the following information with utmost delicacy and secrecy, as it's regarded in a serious manner in my life. But seriously, please don't ever bring this stuff up to anyone else.

"Don't do it in the car. We have kids in the back. Or at least your sister--"

"I don't care. It's my car."

A pack of Camels. Half an hour ago, my mind couldn't come to terms with reality when I found out they were there and who they belonged to. My friend was swinging around a Coach wristlet as if it was a plaything around the mall. Before it smacked me in the face, I grabbed the seemingly-stuffed leather pouch and curiously sliced the zipper open. I didn't think the wristlet's contents would have been such a big deal, but there it was...

Disgust was the immediate forefront emotion in my mind while the memory of a once-honored promise faded into a venom diffusing through my veins; the previous year, my sister and I made a pact together never to start smoking. I did it in honor of our dad, in consideration of how it would utterly destroy him if he lost his daughters to nicotine... Just as he had lost his own father.

Cigarettes. They killed my grandfather. They took his life, they broke my father's heart, and back at the present moment, they had begun to break mine too.

I stood in utter disappointment at the evidence of a broken promise laying right in my hands. There was only one message sprawled across my face: a look that only portrayed the pain of betrayal. My eyes took a double, triple, and quadruple take at the box, scanning left to right and then back left. To my unpleasant surprise, I didn't read the label wrong. I wasn't mistaken... but I was let down.

Nonchalantly sitting in the little pouch was a half-empty box of stoges and a lighter.

Cigarettes. My sister's cigarettes.

As my consciousness returned to the present moment's dialogue in the front seats, my head snapped forward. The black-on-black interior messed up my vision, and I was blinded past the passenger headrest that seemed to blend in with the night.

But, as if on cue, a small, fiery orange circle stood out against the dark canvas before my eyes. My pupils caught this and began to focus as I slowly peered forward. All of a sudden, although expected, I was shoved back by the atrocious trail of smoke that slammed into my respiratory system. My breath instinctively held itself, my eyes glared straight forward as my sister held a lit stoge out the window, and the venom in my veins from half an hour ago floated into my head, consuming me into a state of silent disappointment and... Distrust.

I get that it is my sister's car and she can do whatever she wants in it. I get that my sister is eighteen and she can do whatever she wants because of that. I understand, and I can't do anything about her choices.

But sometimes the ties you hold with your family -- the promises you make with your own flesh and blood -- bind you to a little more that isn't subject to human age or law. The way she went back on the promise we made to each other and for my father's sake just... hurt.

Cigarettes. They left my grandfather lifeless, left my dad fatherless... and now, here I am, left faithless in what I thought could have been an act of kindness honored... in what could have been a promise well-kept.