Ecstatic smoky memory

The pleasure was mine, all mine.

How I shivered in ecstasy, how I longed for the moment to linger.

Not one but two beautiful cigarettes had been lit, so close beside me on the bench that long ago evening. As one lovely mouth clamped tight and drew in a draught of sweet smoke, indulging her nicotine passion, another mouth was opening in a thick, smoky exhale.

I was bathed in smoke, shrouded in smoke, soaked in smoke, puff after puff, breath after breath – as rich, intoxicating and delicious as the mists that must fill the air of some happy place in heaven. I inhaled the fumes that poured from those lips, inhaled so hard that it hurt, and held the smoky elixir inside of me as long as I possibly could.

We never spoke a word to each other. I had been there when they wandered into the place, for a break from work perhaps, or from a round of shopping. I got up as they approached, because I guessed they might be seeking a place to smoke and I knew they wouldn’t sit there if a cigarette-less person occupied the spot.

They lit up and I immediately sat back down. Which odd move on my part conveyed two possible silent messages: I was a non-smoking jerk who was trying to spoil their cigarette break, like those cranks who sit in smoking sections, scowl and cough. Or, I absolutely, completely, totally, did not mind that they were smoking.

For once in my tortured life, I won. They assumed the latter, as odd as such a notion might be. I was as exultant as a kid at Christmas as they kept right on smoking, paying no heed whatsoever to the fact that their smoke was blowing right in my face. They made no attempt at all to aim their exhales away, or even to hold their cigarettes down to prevent the sidestream smoke from twisting and twining its way into my airspace. I was of as little concern as the armrest on the benches.

Oh, this is how it must have been in the good old days, I thought. Anywhere a woman might have gone in years gone by, she might be expected to bring her cigarette – to the schoolhouse, to the store, to the movies, onto a plane, into the maternity ward -- and as each pleasurable puff left her lips, almost nobody minded where it went.

None but a few inveterate whiners had any problem with enjoying secondhand the fragrant, smoky perfume that every fashionable lady exhaled from lips of deepest red. Fain might a man curse at the aroma of a bakery drifting out onto the street, or the rich leather tones of a new sofa, as to rail at a woman’s heavenly exhale.

But the whiners persisted. And they have won. And today, I went back to that mall, for the first time in a long time, for it is far from my home. To my great sorrow, the smokers were banished; the air was clean, in a relative way, but I felt as if the life and soul had been sucked out of the place. I bought nothing and I did not linger.