First year, I remember looking at the strangers on the street. The stranger wearing Gucci dress pants or a beige camisole, or Levi jeans, or part of the Kylie lip kit. One in every couple of strangers had a cigarette in between their fingers.
I remember thinking that they were stupid. Admiring them from afar for whatever issues they were dumb enough to think they could run away from with a pull from the end of a cancer stick.
Each inhale, they went about their own lives. I’d cringe at them, pitiful and confused.
What makes it okay to them? The addiction? The illusion of knowing where you’re going in life?
Straight to an early death?
Summer of first year, my friend offers me a cigarette while we vape. Vaping has never been addictive for me, although it never lacked in addictive substances. So I take it.
What is this beast of a thing that took both my parents as addicts at the young ages of 16? What was so strong that my father only quit after a minor heart attack, my mother a still a slave to it every couple of hours?
It doesn’t taste monstrous. Or appear to ignite my lungs with irreparable damage.
I smoke more than the friend who offered me the first one does that night.
The same summer, my first boyfriend apologizes that he smokes.
“Alright,” I say to him. “Pass me one?”
He does, but not without eyeing me. “You can’t tell your mother, ever, that I am starting you on those.”
“You’re not,” I say easily. It’s the truth.
I was started on them the day I decided to not try to be better. Better than him, or better than my parents.
I inhale like a pro, and as we walk, hand in hand, he teaches me how to flick the ashes right.
“Sorry,” I tease, “guess I just need some practice.”
As I flick it to the floor, I reflect. Should I smoke another at all?
Might as well.
I shouldn’t. It’s obvious in the cough that grows from my chest as I try to sleep. As I try to answer a question in class. Second year has started, and I stand watching strangers.
I have on Adidas leggings and an expensive crop top from Aritzia. I brandish my white converse with each step and my Fenty gloss is matted to my lips. The strangers watch me as I sit, as I open my bag and bring a cigarette up, newly boyfriend-less and lost amidst addiction.
It takes me a few tries to light it. Just like it does to talk for too long without coughing, or to figure out how to mask the smell of cigarettes from my parents.
On the street here, being watched by strangers, there is nothing I could do to disguise myself. I took the cigarette from my bag, lit it with my lighter, and my lips are wrapped around it.
Sometimes, I glare at some of the strangers who watch me. Along with the head rush, cigarettes make me feel rushed, irritated, and frantic.
Rushed, because there are so many things I could be doing instead of sitting outside by myself.
Irritated, because I can feel the need for another one as soon as the first is lit, each pack draining my savings.
Frantic, because this is wrong.
I inhale. I hold it. I exhale.
It’s wrong.
As I stand to walk to my next class, I smile at the next stranger in front of me, a cigarette in their mouth.
The head rush makes me dizzy and relaxed, and I almost trip into them.
“Sorry,” I say.
It’s the meaningless apology given to any stranger. A little more quietly, I repeat it to myself.
“Sorry.”
Later, when I am coughing, and it feels like my lungs might be emerging from my throat and onto the sheets of my bed at any second, I apologize to my mother for waking her.
I apologize to my friend for going outside for a smoke.
I apologize to my cousin when he sees me smoking on social media.
I apologize to a stranger when I don’t have another cigarette.
I don’t apologize to myself, because the only way to do that would be to stop.
Inhale, apologize, and repeat.
The repeat keeps me going.
Comments