I bought my first pack of cigarettes from the corner store down the side street from work. It cost me $17. That’s more than I make in tips on a slow night at the café.
I remember the smell of smoke on the breeze at a music festival and the memory is pleasant. Nostalgic. Wrapped up with recollections of music and dancing and crying from partying for three days ad a child without sleeping and probably sensory issues from a bad contact high.
I don’t smoke the cigarettes. I am flirting with the idea of a nicotine addiction to cope with the painful stress of working fast shifts in food service until 10PM several nights a week. I am flirting with an excuse to step outside and take a breath when I am tired. I am flirting with the concept of dying an early death from lung cancer because I might slightly prefer this to a future of growing old and being lonely. But I do not smoke the cigarettes. I just have them in my bag.
What did you get at the corner store? Our jewish line cook with bad teeth and a beanie who inhales vape juice and has red bull energy drinks in his veins wants to know.
I tell him. He is suddenly very still. This man, who quotes bad takes from republican talk shows and constantly talks shit about his partner. This man, who is nice to me and on the worst days will hit me with the words don’t quit on me. He looks sad.
“Don’t start,” he tells me. “It isn’t worth it.”
One time my mom caught me leaning out the window of my attic bedroom smoking from a pack of camels I confiscated from a friend. I told the friend I was smoking them – he used to roll his own from a huge discount bag of cheap mystery tobacco. He had a smokers cough. He said that he could quit at any time. He nearly always had a cigarette in his hand.
“You should throw those away,” he told me. “It isn’t worth it.”
I did throw them away. But after my mom caught me smoking out the window, exactly one time, all hell broke loose between us. This was around the time of the beginning of the mutually toxic power struggle from hell.
During the worst of it, I turned to my kid sister, who has been smoking for years. I crashed on the couch at the trailer, which was so full of smoke you could hardly see through the smog. I stole a lighter from her redneck mechanic roommate.
The other day I ordered a latte with a shot of espresso and the buzz from the caffeine had me shaking and nauseous and wanting to cry, so I walked up the cemetery and sat alone under a tree by the tomb and smoked a cigarette and looked up through the burnt orange leaves at the blue of an October sky. And I felt truly peaceful calm for the first time in days. My lungs stil hurt pretty badly from the smoke. I’ve been coughing.
I have to be so careful with that sensation of quiet, of calm. The temptation is to use that on purpose, as medicine, because god knows I could use that in nearly every waking moment of my days.
And then I went back to work.
The other night I was washing dishes at closing and my arms were in hot greasy water up to my elbows, and I thought – what if in all of rest of my life, this was all there was? And I think I probably wanted to cry again, then, too.
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“Don’t quit on me.”