Still Cool

There’s always someone outside with a cigarette. At 8 AM before work, in the parking lot, at the party when everyone’s inside. They’re usually doing the thing—leaning, exhaling, that whole performance of not caring while visibly caring quite a lot. And they probably think it still looks good. It doesn’t, but I understand why they think that.

World No Tobacco Day happens every May 31st, which is almost quaint. Like the cultural moment isn’t already long past, like we’re all still living in 1985 and need an official day to remember that smoking might not be a good idea. The whole thing is a museum piece at this point. Smoking is already dead as a cultural force. What’s left is just people with their routines, trying to hold onto some version of themselves from ten or fifteen years ago.

I quit, eventually, after a lot of years of thinking I wouldn’t. Not because I suddenly believed it was bad for me—I always knew that—but because I got tired of the daily negotiation. The small lies you tell yourself to keep doing something you’ve decided to keep doing. At some point the weight of that got heavier than the want. These days when I see someone smoking I feel something like nostalgia, except it’s not for the cigarette. It’s for the person who needed it to feel like themselves. That person’s pretty much gone now. Just the habit remains.