10 :: american spirit ::
[posted 11/19/00]
There is a turbulence around her. She stands out in the alleyway behind Tympanum and exhales. Her breath makes spiraling white shapes in the chilly air which dance for a moment, then dissipate into the whirl of the dark evening. She roots in the pocket of her ratty hunter's coat with two fingers and pulls out a two-thirds-empty pack of American Spirit cigarettes. She taps one into an open notch between the fingers of her other hand, guides it up to her lips. She turn her broad back to the wind and hollows her hands around her lighter. She drags, leans up against the wall's ragged concrete again, and looks over the crumpled cigarette pack, her mind hungry for something to read.
Surgeon General's Warning: Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, And May Complicate Pregnancy. Uh-huh, she thinks.
Sales to Minors Prohibited. There's a goddamn laugh. She started smoking when she was fourteen. She's twenty-eight now: that means she's smoked for, holy shit, half her life. She remembers having her first cigarette outside a fucking roller skating rink. It left her loopy and dizzy, which seemed exactly the state that the roller skating and the disco lights had failed to inspire in her. It seems obvious now: if you want a boy to hold your hand you go roller skating. If you want an altered state, you take drugs.
She remembers how, in college, she and her friends would always discuss drugs with a mock wistfulness, saying things like, Ah, drugs!, as though drugs were an old friend, fondly remembered. This was probably a way to express genuine wonder, and perhaps fear, at all that drugs could do.
She shoves the pack back into her pocket. Down there there's another bit of paper, she can remember what it is without looking: it's the Walgreen's reciept with Jakob's phone number on it. She hasn't called him. She should: it's been six months since she's gotten laid, and he seems eager enough. In a way, though, it's hard for her to care about someone new. She's twenty-eight and she is full of so many people already. She reviews her dense field of memory. She remembers sitting in a bathroom stall in high school, smoking, her foot jammed up against the door because the administration had removed the fucking locks, attempting to discourage illicit activity with the constant threat of possible intrusion. You know what else she remembers? Smoking anyway.
She drags. She exhales. A cloud. Its erasure.
::
