boot the cigarette
Ok I smoked for the biggest part of my adult life.
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I started when I was around 17, soon after I started dating my high school sweetheart, which was one of those scruffy looking punk girls who would skip class by jumping over the fence at the school parking lot.
She used to hang with a bunch of weirdos, mostly older guys who were into heavy metal and having bands, and were generally cool and goateed.
And alongside that there were the cigarettes. I couldn't understand how kids managed to look so busy when I myself had nothing to do, spending most of my afternoons staring at the computer since my internet sucked so much I couldn't play any games.
But the kids with the ripped jeans they had what to do: they were seekers. They had no money also but they aspired to greater things. They wanted booze and they wanted smokes and they wanted to go to concerts on the city.
So when I started getting closer and closer to them, and started to slowly assimilate their yearnings, I felt this connection I haven't felt before, where while we didn't want the exact same stuff, or even enjoyed the same things, most of us had the same cravings.
As off putting as that is, cravings can bring the most antagonistic of personalities together. And what is the thing about having no money? Well, you can't have anything, ever, and so you crave.
And while I didn't understand at the time, these shared cravings, who weren't really ambitions since they didn't really have substance, they became the structure of many of the friendships I would bring with me into my twenties.
You had a whole assortment of people who didn't really share any interests, but were bound together by having experimented things for the first time while they were young.
And while that is something tangible (having lived through things), since that was no ulterior motive to it, it didn't really brought anyone closer in a sentimental level. You didn't became friends with someone you hanged out with, you became accomplices. And as it goes with accomplices, when you want to go on with your life, you got to get rid of them.
Looking back now to how stranded I felt in that small town, hanging out with these people that just didn't really had anything in common with me, I can finally understand what is so familiar to me about cigarettes.
They still represent this trait that can become a shared experience with anyone, independently of where you are. But I have other things now. I have actual interests that I can share with people.
So I might just boot the cigarettes.