Allison's Archives

The idea of smoking is one that is only interesting to me when I am not in its immediate vicinity. Even then, it is the idea of someone else smoking rather than myself that I find intriguing. Some kind of quiet surrender, some kind of deliberate self-destruction that stretches itself across the fabric of time. To hold something so small up against your lips and choose to breathe it in rather than the fresh air that your body instinctively craves. To let something foreign wander around the body your mother tried to protect all your younger years. 

The smoke gets passed around the circle like your only source of survival and I berate you for it. I’m hypocritical, I know; it’s not as if I don’t have vices of my own, and I’d let you stomp on them any second with my hands above my head. I watch from a fair distance—far enough to put a river between me and the conversation, close enough for the smoke to visibly waft past me, inciting a cough—and it is all at once a godly and ugly look on you. 

A consistent ritual: The inhale and the drag. The soft, practiced flick to prompt the ashes to fall onto the ground. The exhale to the side so as to be polite in not blowing it into someone’s face. The way you hold the smoke inside of you longer than you’ve held onto hope. It’s appalling, but forgivable if I squinted. What would my father say? Worse, what would my mother imply with her silence? 

The conversation trudges on as if the fate of the world hinges on it and I watch as your cigarette shrivels and I can’t bring myself to think about whether the same is happening to your insides. You look at me and almost offer me a hit before remembering who I am; you forget yourself when you’re clouded in smoke. You say you need a cigarette but what you really mean is that you need to be understood. You want someone to stand next to you and read you inside out without you having to utter a single word. You say you can quit at any time but you’ve never truly weighed the value of your promises. 

I smile in return at your mistake and curse in Mandarin under my breath. Anger is always best declared in your native tongue. The justification of anger, however, is always better expressed in a second language that you have learned detached from emotions, structured by grammar and logic. I can’t figure why I’m angry at this. In Mandarin, I know how to feel angry; in English, I know how to explain it. But right now, neither language is working, so I resort to silence.

It’s easier to blame the smoke—visible, offensive, deliberate. It clings to me, makes your presence linger long after you’re gone. I can wrinkle my nose, hold my breath, and wave it away. It gives my discomfort a name, a shape. The smoke is just the thing I can see, the thing I can point my finger at without sounding unreasonable. But it’s the casualness of it all that bothers me. How easily you reach for and work a lighter, how inconsequential you make it seem, like you’ve done it a thousand times. There’s a carelessness to it, an impermanence, too, that I’ve seen before in other places. In other parts of you. It’s the same nonchalance in how you speak, how your words scatter in conversations, meant to hit but never to land. The way you begin a train of thought and never arrive at the station, assuming I’m capable of filling it in.

You smoke in front of me and I give you the kind of look that says, If you love me, you’d put it down. Or maybe it is the kind of look that says, If you want me to keep loving you, you’d put it down. Whichever look I shot and whichever you interpreted, you looked me in the eye and took a long drag. 

In through the teeth. Down to the lungs. Out again. 

Easy come, easy go. 

If you had just put down the cigarette, I might have just taken your last name. 

[This piece is neither about smoking nor is it about cigarettes. Go figure.]