I tell my friends I don’t smoke. That is not strictly true, anymore. I don’t smoke often enough, in my opinion, for it to matter, a pack split between me and my best friend lasts us for at least a couple of months. I tell people I don’t smoke, but my best friend knows that is a lie, a lie she lives with me, too. Because smoking is more than the burn of the smoke in your lungs, the ashy taste in your mouth, and sometimes it is all you need.Â
On nights out we bring the pack with us, light on up as we move from bar to bar. A conversation starter, a conversation holder, keep us warm in the cold city night. Passed back and forth. We don’t need to talk with a cigarette. Fingers slipping, the drinks and the nicotine making it harder, so we laugh as it goes between us. We can just look at each other, the intimacy and love passing across to us with each turn we take, and we don’t need to talk because we are doing something together. We feel its desired effect; something to make us older, cooler, to show the men walking by; look at us, all grown up.Â
A cigarette split between friends is hardly dangerous at all. It feels like connection, a tether, between potential acquaintances, a pull that starts something more. Passed back and forth, back and forth, lips to lips, fingers to fingers, something to hold people together to the point you have to start talking. A moment of reprieve of a claustrophobic inside gathering, something to take you outside into the quiet, a cigarette can be a beginning. I sat out on a deck, of a person I don’t really know too well, and shared a cigarette with a close friend of mine and someone I sort of knew from high school. In another situation, this conversation could have been stilted, they being long time friends, I so could have easily slid to the outside, saying barely anything at all, as I do in those situations. But we were all there, doing the same thing, passing a cigarette back and forth, lips to lips, and the shared intimacy and the certainty that truly, we were not so different, made it easy. We sat and talked and laughed, and no conversation flowed as fluently as smoke, like a conversation with a cigarette.Â
A cigarette alone is a moment outside alone. In times of stress, you have the perfect excuse of a moment alone outside. When I feel like I am going insane, I open my secret box of cigarettes, take my bright red lighter, messily covered in Barbie stickers, and open the door. It is time to breathe. The smoke feels like hating, sure, the chemicals in my lungs feel sticky and hazy, but I let the nicotine wash over me and everything feels quiet.Â
I don’t smoke much, no. Not so often that I can’t feel the full wash of it, let my head go slightly dizzy as I look to the sky, look to the other person, look at my best friend, and smile. It is a bad habit, sometimes it feels like hate, but it is confidence, connection, a moment of quiet. Sometimes all I can ever want is given to me in a cigarette.
