I Smoke Therefore I Am a Writer

My parents chain smoked for most of my life. My mother told me she knew I had started when I no longer gagged and choked when she lit one in the car.

I tried to smoke in high school. All the cool kids did. You know that girl who just bums everyone else's smokes because she won't admit that she is a smoker? Yeah? I was that girl. It was only partially that I didn't want to commit to being a full time smoker, after all, I have always been a bit afraid of commitment. It was more that I was cheap. I only had one or two a week so why bother buying them? Because to bum them constantly is incredibly annoying, you may suggest. And you'd be right. So by college, I was buying my own.

I never really liked it in high school, but here I was in my black motorcycle jacket, going to school in New York City. I had to smoke. That's just what girls in black motorcycle jackets going to school in New York City did.

My roommate was a smoker and we would pool our money together to buy cigarettes. There's not much money coming in your freshman year of college, you know? And if it is, it's most likely going to booze. And in my case, concerts and Doc Martens.

We'd scrounge the floor, closets, bathroom, and kitchen. I would say I was known as the girl who bought smokes with pennies, but I later learned that is pretty common in college.

When we finally reached the point of not being able to stand our room smelling like an ashtray, we decided to quit together. She had been smoking for years and had to deal with the physical addiction. I had only been smoking for a few months so the physical wasn't that strong, but the mental (remember my plan was to sit in cafes drinking cappuccino and smoking cigarettes and writing poetry--this was when you could still smoke in public places) seemed insurmountable.

We attempted a couple of times. A few of the times we actually picked up burning cigarettes on the ground in Washington Square Park if we had seen the person smoking it and they weren't gross. Come on, we were young. We were dumb. And this was before everyone started carrying hand santizer and became too afraid to touch another human or even breathe.

Eventually I tried the marijuana solution. I had heard that the best way to stop smoking tobacco is to start smoking pot. Okay, maybe that isn't why I wanted to start smoking again, but go with me here.

I hadn't smoked in over a year. I was stoned during my last two years of high school, and that isn't something I am proud of. But this time around I was only going to do it a bit.

My roommate watched as I held the bowl to my lips and moved the lighter to the weed. Instead of lighting the pot, I lit up my bangs. It was a quick fire, more of a spark, but my bangs didn't fare too well. But it was nothing a quick creative trim couldn't help.

After I was extinguished we decided to go out for some dessert. There was a great pastry shop around the corner and we stopped in for black forest cake. Now, I've never eaten black forest cake and the red chewy, kind of slimy things, took me a bit off guard. I swished them around in my mouth for a while, chewing, sucking, trying to feel what they were. And then I knew: they were lips.

Someone had put lips in my chocolate cake. I was chewing on lips. Icky, gooey, detached lips. Lips that belonged to a complete stranger; probably not as okay looking as the strangers whose cigarettes we jumped on the ground for after they threw them down. The more I chewed, the chewier they became. And seconds later, I lost the cake and the lips, too.

Since then, I haven't ever touched black forest cake.