Cigarettes

Tonight is one of those nights where I wish I were a smoker. It is raining and I can't sleep. I was laying in bed listening to the wind and the tapping of rain against my apartment building, the droplets falling into the pool and thinking that I would like to sit on my patio and smoke.
I have never been a smoker, but I have smoked occassionally. I always liked the allure of sitting on an apartment porch (not balcony/porch, but usually steps like on a Brownstone or a 1950s apartment, not my 1975 townhome) and smoking. Not like my neighbors who stand outside their front doors and haphazardly smoke, or those who smoke in their apartment and somehow their smoke gets into the vents and into my upstairs hallway . . . but like my false image of what smoking + cool could be.

When I was in my early 20s I am sure I did that at some point; sat on the porch in the middle of the night pretending there was nothing in the world that mattered, trying to fight off the thick wet heat of a California summer. Tonight it felt like a summer storm, it was so hot today and then I came out of class around 9 and it was still warm but raining. By the time I got home it was no longer a summer storm, it was just Portland.

By the by, I don't really want to smoke in that I don't want to be a smoker. I can't stand the after taste, the after smell, the lifelong effects . . . But I would like to sit on my patio listening to the rain and watching smoke slip into the night.

Instead I will envy Kyle's ability to sleep and listen to my smoke-free rain.