Feeling a bit nostalgic since I quit smoking. Here’s a piece I doubt will ever find a home away from here.
Cigarettes and Sunshine
There’s garbage piled on the side of the street in clear plastic bags, the detritus of youth, the suggestion of fast food wrappers, convenience coffee cups, for rent fliers on neon paper beneath translucent skin. There’s a half circle of brick that overlooks the sidewalk, but it might as well be in the clouds for all the smoke. We nicotine fiends come between classes. The rest of the day, I’ll only see outside longingly through the slits between blinds but for now I breathe the free air, fifteen minutes to sit on the sun-warmed bricks in a tee-shirt and jeans, a belt cinched a notch too tight. To smoke a cigarette. To listen in that weary way that belongs to a student on a warm afternoon. On campus you are never alone and you are most alone, countless strangers, heads bent to cell phones, ears plugged with Skull Candy, eyes to the ground as though we’ve all been ankle-bitten and are standing vigilant against the next attack, or else staring brazenly forward, and that’s worse, probing, presumptive. I never know what eyes suggest. Or if they’re talking to me. My own eyes follow the trail of smoke–up, up, and away from the brick and the forsaken pickle slice gathering ash. I think the squirrels will still eat it.
There is a man in a suit and wing tipped shoes laughing into the plastic tumor that separates us all from each other. He’s not a man, really, that’s what I think. He’s a boy with a long face, and a man’s body who laughs too loud, and there’s something immature about it. It isn’t silence that he breaks, not with the thrum of two dozen conversations between classes, but it’s irksome. It’s like missing the punch line. And this is an afternoon when one wants to laugh, or at least smile. It’s the sunshine after the rain, the warmth after the cold. Next to me there’s a black kid puffing away, he wears baggy gray sweatpants with zippered pockets, and I want to tell him how wonderfully comfortable those look. But I don’t, because I never know how something like that would come off. Instead, I close my eyes. Young Mr. Suit has stopped laughing, and the noise is now soft and meaningless. Sneakered footsteps, the swish of a zipper, popped gum, a lighter flicking next to me. I open my eyes, see that Young Mr. Suit has gone, so has the black kid. A girl with a checkered backpack, short hair, and high cheekbones takes his place, exhales smoke in a thin-lipped stream while a boy with high school acne gobbles a tuna sandwich in the little time that is left to us. I know I should get up, go to class. But I linger. I feel alive there in the January sun.
