Got a light?

Smoking is cool.

They try to tell you it's a disgusting habit, that it gives you yellow teeth and fingernails and blackened lungs and a nasty cough and sometimes brings even cancer and death.

But just think about how you can gently hold a smoke between your fingers. How smoke curls up over your lips, then trails elegantly behind you. You exude "nothing matters" and "everything matters"; you intrigue without speech. Hide a smoke behind your ear and for safekeeping cover it with soft hair. Grip it in the corner of your mouth when you answer the telephone. Toss the smoke on the pavement and smudge it beneath your heel.

There's a community of smokers, a society to converse with in work-day breaks. Always someone to share a light with on the porch outside the party and philosophize with in the forest clearing by the high school when cutting class (what's more of a real education, anyway?). Always someone else who craves this cool, too. Always someone to enjoy it with you, even strangers.

I've never smoked in my life. I don't think I ever will. I don't think I'll ever know what that feels like.