especially warm nights

On especially warm nights in September during my freshman year of college, I would accompany Kevin, a boy I was helplessly drawn to, as he sat outside our dorm building and smoked cigarettes. I would sit either next to him, or across from him on a parallel bench, and inhale as he exhaled, quietly taking in air that had seamlessly entered and exited his body in a way that was visible, and, I thought, beautiful. We didn't often talk much on these smoke breaks, but I remember it always feeling like an intimate, friendly, meaningful kind of existence. And anyway, while I wasn't rebellious enough to take up smoking myself, and wasn't independent enough to spend time inhaling and exhaling visible strands of smoke into the sky by myself, sitting with Kevin and watching as he methodically smoked cigarettes, sometimes chain-smoking them in a way as natural as my own breathing, felt deliciously adult. 

I wrote a piece when I was in high school trying my best to explain in words the feeling I would get from standing outside on my front porch in the summer--seeking a concrete image for the way my feet would grip the still-warm cement and the way the night was quiet of cars and loud from mosquitoes and bullfrogs all at once. I went back and read the piece today, and it's actually quite beautiful. 

One of the paragraphs reads: 

"I have always wished to take up smoking at about 11:30 on an especially warm summer night. Not because i want to feel tobacco entering my body, but simply because i want to turn my head to the sky and blow a fresh wave of unhealthy angst up at the stars. They mock me in their infinity; it is ridiculous to be able to stare in a simple direction and feel so insignificant. Would it be a simple comfort to have something in my hands? that if every so often i could bring it to my lips and inhale a little more poison of independence? Because after all, smoking is an adult decision and being an adult calls for the rickety shaking of hands that comes from making big decisions." 

When I read over this, I'm impressed, but also not surprised at the typicality of this writing. Sometimes I hardly remember what it was like to be sixteen, to feel that everything in the world was both at my fingertips and against me, to understand that everything was new, and I was one of the first people in the world to experience it. Or at least to experience it in this way. How naive, right? 

I certainly don't feel like a grown adult now, but I look back at my memories of sitting outside Flannery O'Connor Hall and inhaling Kevin's secondhand smoke, and read over my writings detailing the fragility and independence of an especially warm summer night on my front porch, and I feel the mountains over which I have come since then. If I were to write a letter to myself from that period of time, from when my world was only really as big as my daily commute to and from high school and my imagination was left to fill in all the gaps, I'm not entirely sure what I would say. Although I'm not sure I would really need to say anything anyway. 

We all go through life lessons, right? And it was up to me to learn that sitting and watching someone else smoke several cigarettes in a row is only magic if you're blinded enough by the other person that you don't mind the smell.