“Cig” is a ballad about 3 different characters. The first is a trouble girl who runs away from home and moves to Santa Fe. The second is a high school quarterback who now works at the local gas station. The third is me in the form of a musician playing to nobody at some venue in the Midwest. The characters are used mostly as songwriting tropes to realize the punchline “in the end we all burn out like cigarettes”.
However, Verse 3 acknowledges that since we all fall short of our childhood dreams ultimately, we should embrace our collective and personal failures and not let them get us down.