photo: ‘for everything.’
song: secret players society – “keep me”
‘now rushed into this brightness,
as if by a shutter
that, once opened,
can never be closed.’
— billy collins
it’s something i think about regularly, whether the smoke from a cigarette i inhaled two years ago on the beach in california, or the mountains in denver, or the coffee-stained, nicotine streets of chicago is still floating around inside my body.
like one atom of tar and smoke, one atom of time, one atom of a booze- and coffee-fueled night is a part of my body now. attached to the walls of my heart, coursing still through my blood, around and around and around again. always. and when i exhaled its brothers in a final sweep of movement from my body, stamping out a cigarette on my boots or crushing it on the sidewalk, one particle of smoke remained, trapped in the canals of my being. and now he is joined by a new family of fellow atomic smoke — the last cigarette smoked in the golden sunshine of a perfect day, the break up cigarettes, the after-sex cigarettes, the early mornings and late nights and too-far drives.
have they joined together in a band of orphan smoke particles, or did they resign themselves to a life of solitude? a life of lonely rhythmic cycles, accompanied by the heavy sound of blood pulsing through my veins. accompanied also by the memory of where they came, the significance they held at the time of my life.
