A Farewell to Cigs

Published March 20, 2007

By Lauren McGonagle-Akin

I quit smoking. My mother has gone giddy with glee at least five times, at this point. She gives me pats on the back. I generally smell differently, too – more like the shower for longer, I suppose. I feel more and more acquainted with a different sort of breath every day. But the truth is I look back on my smoking days with significant amounts of affection and nostalgia. This is unlikely to change.

My favorite smokes were in the gold of the morning, the expansive blue of the night, and in the throes of what most of my peers would undoubtedly recognize as quintessential episodes of youth: Really though, I preferred to smoke alone, and would often veer stealthily away from the L/L mass-smoking exoduses. Every cigarette became my ticket to another five-minute revelation.

There is a glittering web of unspoken rules visible only to the smoker. Cigarettes provide friendly collateral, welcome favors, and few minute bouts of often intense bonding within any peer group. My freshman year roommate was alarmingly messy. I constantly tidied up, sometimes even turning down her bed. But she constantly bummed me smokes.

We’d journey downtown to Garcia’s to buy our favorite Vanilla Dream Cigarettes (whose packaging, I’m quite certain, was designed by Lisa Frank) and often end up in adventures that were always uniquely ours: These would not have occurred, at least not in the same form, had we not shared such a culturally despised habit.

Most college smokers could describe a sort of smoking community that has inevitably coalesced over the semesters. Smokers console, congratulate, and affectionately shoot the shit between puffs. These moments are guaranteed by the
nature of the habit, that and the laws that keep smokers outside.

Whether griping, gloating, or articulating your latest profound thought, smokers don’t need to worry about an opportunity or an audience; both will undoubtedly arrive within the hour. And should one of these conversations begin to drag on, cigarettes allow for graceful exits every time you reach the filter.

When bumming cigs, the intellect, sexual orientation, major, age, ethnicity, Sunday morning habits, height, weight, political views, accepted dogmas and yes, cigarette preference, ceases to matter. If they’re smoking and you want a cigarette, you walk up and proceed to bum.

Spending most of my smoking years underage, I would find myself bumming often. Something would occur in moments like these: my dirty habit was miraculously, and effectively able to strip me of hundreds of those initial, lightning-quick judgments we all silently toss out at our fellow human. Things became much simpler: they’re smoking; maybe, they’ll give me one. The rapid disintegration of judgment is one of the most valuable and noteworthy aspects of smoking.

Nowadays, I don’t see the moon as often anymore. I don’t subject myself to nighttime smoking in frigid temperatures. A guaranteed 30 minutes of aimless and lovely thought has become less of an evenly distributed daily staple. I hit the porches of parties less often. Less of my towels get shoved under the dorm door. No more after-finals, first-day-of-spring, finished-the-paper, fresh-snow, commemorative smokes. There’s now the lamentable coffee without cigarettes.

I bid them all farewell. Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, I had a revelation one day while smoking that my body does not need cigarettes. I realized the profound capacity of my body – “It works so well!” I marveled. So, I ditched the habit, to ensure the sound and miraculous functionality of my own flesh and bones.

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