Merry Monroe #3

She still maintained, to her mother and gynecologist, that she only smoked when she was out with her friends, drinking.

Of course, she started sneaking smokes on her way home from the bars, and then started smoking one on her way to the subway at the beginning of the night. Then, the hangover smoke, just one, with black coffee and sunglasses. When her boyfriend broke up with her, she chain-smoked for three weeks, Indian-style on her fire escape, waving her hand in a futile attempt to keep the upstairs neighbors from complaining to the super about her smokey loitering. Of course, these same neighbors heard her tears, angry cell phone conversations followed promptly by sad ones to her two best friends. They didn't say "Hi" in the hallways, the nameless neighbors upstairs, but they knew more about her than her mother did (most obvious of which, of course, was the smoking).


So this social smoker became less and less social and more and more smoker, and now, waiting for the thunderstorm to pass under the awning of some jazz club, she lit a cigarette between her wet fingertips, just to take the edge off from a long day at work.


She met her current "boyfriend" (quotations because she hadn't yet actually spoken to him on the phone yet, just texts and IMs - her once-arbitrary junior high rule about a phone call being the start of a relationship becoming more and more insightful as she aged) outside of a bar on the Upper East Side (she hated this neighborhood more than any other, even Murray Hill. But it was a birthday party for an old friend she had just reconnected with, so she begrudgingly trekked to the land that self-awareness forgot). They had both escaped the bar for a smoke break, urged by the bouncer to stand the legally-required 15 feet from the door. They rolled their eyes at each other and by the end of the night were making out. They text each other on the weekends now, meeting up when they're in the same neighborhood. Since their relationship started because of cigarettes, she wasn't ready to not smoke when he smoked - which was much more often than she thought she did. But, what if he would go outside the bar and meet some NEW blonde with a penchant for cigarettes and kissing? So smoked she did, dutifully, every 20 minutes on these nights they would meet up.


The summer storm passed as quickly as it came, so she dropped what was left of the cigarette, the cherry sizzling for a second on the wet pavement.