I was under the impression that this would not last long. This feeling of self-destruction in the sense of falling in love with a mistake I committed some years ago is something I thought wouldn’t last at all. But I am greatly mistaken. It was a mistaken love affair after all. But unfortunately for me, my mistakes are the stuff that I cherish the most and had always wanted to get back on.
If anyone of you thought I am smoke-free, think again. I took a break with the sticks for a few days time but now I am back. Willingly back.
As I sit across an elongated bench outside the building I work at I began grasping for my cigarette in the plastic bag of Mini Stop. Out of the freshly opened flip-top box I smelled the aroma of tobacco filled rolled paper on my fingers. Almost shaking I lit it and the sparks began. Every color, every lines, every movements and every whispers of talk around me is suddenly full of life. This is such a wonderful thing isn’t it?
As I drag on my stick I noticed that I was the only girl in the crowd. Three men sitting on my left, one of them sitting right next to me, a seemingly haggard looking man in a pale white barong sat quietly on my right and some five to six men chatting animatedly a few meters in front of me on the other side of the area. These are strangers. And I love strangers around me when I smoke. Because the fact that they don’t know me allows me the freedom to just be me. For them I am just a girl who smokes, nothing more and nothing less.
Indeed I am. A girl who sits in a crowded place of men in leather shoes and business suits dragging on two to three sticks a day. Or shall I say dragging on two to three sticks a sit. Because cigarette is my lunch and my dinner. Not my breakfast though because I always wake up late, just in time to run wet-haired for work. So there. Just lunch and dinner. It’s not that I’m on a diet or is saving money but because I’m always in no appetite for food in the cafeteria or in anywhere else my workmates frequent for lunch breaks. Just that.
So I took out another stick and wait for some girls to come out and sit on the same bench with me to have a drag in their own cigars. I wish. But none has come out to play. Suddenly I realized something is wrong. There are no other girls in sight. What the hell is wrong with the world today? Am I the only girl in the world now who smokes in a public place like this surrounded by men in haggard faces and laser eyes? I don’t get this.
Now I’m offended. How strange can this be? Now my being back to the old habit is bothering me. I feel like I’m not normal at all. Oh this sucks. I put out the smoke on the ashtray post and stormed out of the area. My head is spinning with unusual mockery. Staying in that place so full of crappy staring old men and playing a stranger was a mistake. Now I am marked. Like old times. When I commit something that no one else has ever done before, which is most likely I have no intention of doing, I am marked. This is so like that. I hate being a stranger and stand being surrounded by stranger who thinks I am strange. Oh, this isn’t making any sense anymore.
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