November 3, 2005

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  Sometimes when I’m smoking I wish I was smoking. But you know what the
  most ironic thing in the world is? I was the one, a long, loooong time
  ago, who convinced my dad to stop smoking. He smoked a lot, like -
  what’s that phrase? – like a fucking chimney. And that’s before I
  understood what a chimney was. But yeah, I convinced him to stop
  smoking. At school, when I still believed everything I learned in that
  little plastic chair molded to little kiddie butts and the world’s
  secrets were being revealed by my teacher, I learned that smoking was
  bad. No, wait      Smoking Is Bad. That’s how
  everyone said it anyway – with capitals.
  So I used to take the No Smoking stickers being passed around campus
  and slap them onto any surface in the house. On the bathroom door under
  the postcard of a baby penguin. On the kitchen wall between the big
  wooden “fork n’ spoon” ubiquitous in Philipino households. I cut out
  pictures of blackened lungs and cancer-encrusted throats and left them
  like Watchtowers on the coffee table, the kitchen table.
  And boy did I rant and rail about the imminent, horrible dangers of smoking: bad breath, yellowed teeth, premature aging.
  And slowly but surely, my dad got the hint that I might want him to
  stop that slow suicide and maybe be around a while longer. He quit
  smoking.
  But yeah, sometimes when I’ve already got a cigarette between my lips
  and I inhale that hot menthol, I wish I wish I wish I was smoking.
  And it seems like evryone starts smoking in High School. When they’re
  teenagers ruled – no, overwhelmed – by a tempest of hormones. I think
  if I’d had sex in high school, I wouldn’t have started smoking. It must
  have been all that sexual tension….. yeah, that’s it. And it’s not
  natural. No, smoking is learned. It’s emulating something – someone -
  we want to be. 
  So I lit up my first fag in Europe.
  Legal drinking when I was sixteen, among suave and world-weary Belgian
  teens, sitting on the patio of a pub, and someone offers me a
  cigarette. What the heck, I think. Couldn’t hurt. So I smoked one and a
  few minutes later, I’m barfing all over the walls of the pub’s tiny
  basement bathroom.
  Banging on the door.
  “Eve, let me in.”
  I gag. I heave.
  “Eve, open the door or I’ll break it down!” Chris yells.
  “I’m fine,” I try to say, but it comes out like a kitten’s whimper.
  “I’m going to count to 10. If you don’t open the door, I’m breaking it
  down.” And he will, too. He’s the quarterback of our football team,
  tall and thick like a redwood, my best friend’s boyfriend who had
  promised her he’d take care of me on this trip.
  “Hold on……. hold on…….” I crawl to the door, open it, and
  collapse into his arms. He drags me outside and I’m too weak and dizzy
  to be embarrassed.

  • 11:43 am
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