Smoking

Like many I suspect, I started smoking to impress a girl. I grew up in Winston-Salem, NC before the Master Settlement Agreement. Smoking was impressively mature to middle-schoolers in that day, in that tobacco town.
I walked projecting the confidence of my budding masculinity a foot ahead of my slender frame into the Rite-Aid and asked the ancient clerk behind the counter for a pack of Camels.
With a knowing smirk, the man passed over a dusty pack of unfiltered camels from the bottom shelf.
“That’ll be $1.75, kid.”
I quickly coughed up two bucks and sprinted out of the store shocked by my success to my friends waiting anxiously in the alley behind the store to see if I had managed this magic trick.
I have quit and started smoking many times in the years since then.
But I still recall the sickening headrush and bellyflops of that first cigarette.
And the first kiss that followed.