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2002-06-15 - 6:20 a.m.
�Is this okay?� I ask her while gently placing my lips around the smoothness of my
passion. My fingers gently closing around it as I close my eyes and inhale the sultry scent
with all my being. I asked her, but I didn�t wait for an answer, instead my lips started
moving, slowly putting more pressure upon it, my tongue gently flicking the tip and I take
a deep breath in and wait for the sublime moment when my body relaxes into the
moment.
�Yeah, it�s okay, really, this is good for me,� she tells me with hungry eyes.
The flickering flame between us snaps to attention and burns steadily as its heat pours
around us, lighting the one thing that makes both of us weak.
�Are you sure, this okay? I ask again.
�Yes, I haven�t smoked in a year, I need to learn how to be around other smokers,�
she sighs while grabbing at the air for even one morsel of wafting smoke to push into her
lungs.
Cigarettes. Sigh.
I don�t even remember when I smoked my first one. I don�t remember the feeling of
it, I don�t remember where I was, I don�t know who I was with. I don�t remember this
because it seems from the beginning of my existence I have been a smoker. When I was in
elementary school we would collect dried grass from our lawns and roll it in paper and
smoke it like a cigarette in the loft of an old barn in back of my house. In middle school
my friend and I stole cigarette butts from her fathers ashtray and smoked them hidden
behind big spools of wire at the phone company. In high school I started buying my own
when I could, if I couldn�t buy them I would have someone else do it for me. I always
kept it relatively secret, only a couple people knew about my smoking, most of my school
friends did not because they were all Miss Prissy Poos.
Then I started working at Frosty Boy. And I started hanging around people from
different schools. We were a group of six and out of the six of us, five smoked. It
became ritual that after work we would go to Subway and eat subs in the parking lot and
then smoke a lot of cigarettes. Slowly my friends at my own school became less important
to me. Instead of hanging out with them after school I would immediately jump in my car
and drive twenty miles to meet Nicole in the parking lot of her school. We would roll
down the windows and drive for hours chain smoking and listening to Janis Joplin at top
volume.
It was the secret language of cigarettes that found me my new group of friends. My
childhood best friend with whom I was inseparable from for nine years became obsolete.
She just didn�t have that bond with me that Nicole had. Not only did she not smoke, but
she had asthma which made my smoking around her impossible. I spent my last year of
high school slowly separating myself from all my friends who I had grown up with and
slowly but surely formed closer bonds with my new group of friends, and the cigarettes,
than I have ever had.
For the ten years Nicole and I have been friends we have maintained our smoke fests.
When she went away to school five hundred miles away I would drive there twice a year
and she would drive here twice a year. It was the routine of cigarettes that kept us excited
about visits. Sometimes on the phone one of us would sigh and say, �Oh, I can�t wait to
be sitting on your back porch with a beer and a cigarette.� We became eachothers crutch,
being together meant that we would be relaxing, talking a mile a minute, dispelling three
months worth of various agitation�s...and smoking, chain smoking.
And then, last year, after her spring trip here, she quit smoking. It took acupuncture,
yoga, knitting and Zyban to make her quit. But she did it. At first, she counted the hours
she hadn�t smoked until it got to the sixth month marker, then she started counting days.
Now she is counting months. I didn�t visit her in the summer or the fall because I was too
scared I wouldn�t be able to not smoke around her and that she would become tempted. I
didn�t know how our relationship would work any more without our rituals.
This spring she came here. It�s been a year since I�ve seen her. I�ve talked to her on
the phone once or twice a week, we�ve exchanged presents for holidays and birthdays, as
we have always done. But it just seemed as though there would be something missing. It
seemed that we wouldn�t spring from bed in the morning looking forward to going out to
breakfast and smoking that one wonderful cigarette with our bellies full of grease and
coffee.
But there wasn�t anything missing. It turns out the cigarettes weren�t our bond. It
wasn�t the glue that held us together. Cigarettes were only a minor happenstance, she and
I probably would have become best friends when we were seventeen with or without the
smokes and the rituals. Cigarettes were only the first common denominator we had. But
we have found others, we would have been friends and we would have found other rituals.
She watched me smoke that cigarette with eyes full of greed. She said, �I�ll never get
over it, but I�ve come too far now,�
And I wonder, because I know I need to quit too, if I will ever be able to let go of that
one comfort I have, if I will ever be able to find something as constant as cigarettes. I
wonder if I can let go of my unhealthy relationship with them like she did. And if I do, it�s
going to take a lot more than acupuncture, knitting and Zyban. It�s going to take
everything I am and everything I will ever have.
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