I was 18 when I smoked my first cigarette. It was at a former friend’s house, during a drinking session. I still remember it vividly even though four years have passed since then; I smoked a mint variety of a popular cigarette brand. I remember that pungent stick hanging awkwardly from my mouth, waiting to be lit by another friend’s fire from the lighter.
I’ve been around smokers since I was in 10th grade. It was the genesis of my exposure to secondhand smoke. By then, me and my friends were only 16-17. It wasn’t legal yet for us to purchase cigarettes but there were always “sari-sari” stores willing to turn a blind eye for a profit. In my friends’ cases, it was a small store tucked several streets away from our campus, where no authority figure ventured.
By the time I reached 12th grade, I must have breathed enough secondhand cigarette smoke to kill a small child. But somehow all the exposure to cigarettes didn’t affect my interest in it in the least. I couldn’t care less about it. That is until; I met someone new. A friend of a friend.
He regularly smoked at the sari-sari store where all the high school kids hung around to ingest and blow smoke from their mouths. For many, it was a social activity and most of the kids who hung out there knew each other on some level. As for me, I was a bystander, witnessing all of it without jumping in.
Soon, I fell in love with that person. I was a woman possessed. I wanted to know every facet of what made him, him, and that of course, included cigarettes. I still have his smoking pattern memorized. He would buy a discounted stick from the lady who managed the sari-sari store, costing him only P6 as opposed to the usual P8 in other stores, along with a few pieces of strawberry-flavored candies to mask the acrid smell and taste of his mouth after consuming the poison. Each time he did this I watched, fascinated. I wanted him to spend me the way he spent that nicotine.
By some miracle, he did. It was at that point that I began to take up the vice. Most of the time, we would have a few drinks at a mutual friend’s house and we would smoke until our lungs gave out. Still, all the cigarettes in the world wouldn’t have knocked my breath out the way he did. He was a vice worse than the one we shared.
We were not the perfect pair. Our relationship had a lot of flaws and accrued many thinly veiled criticisms from the people around us. But that didn’t faze me, like the warnings my smoker friends issued against me when I first decided to join their little cancerous club. Needless to say, we were bad for each other.
In my mind, he was inextricably linked with everything to do with smoking. Its taste, its smell, the way he lit and breathed that first hit, and how he stomped it on the ground after he had drained it of its contents.
That relationship, unsurprisingly, exhausted itself after a while. I still hadn’t quit smoking, I still hadn’t quit him, even after he already did. Why would I, when it was the biggest reminder that we existed in the same space once? Breathed the same toxic air once?
It would take me three years before I decided to quit for good. We hadn’t been in each other’s lives for a long while, and I didn’t even have any idea whether he still enjoyed that regular vice or had quit to try and regain control over the part of his body responsible for giving him the air he needed to breathe.
After a while, the taste and smell of it had become vile to my senses. I no longer did it out of pleasure, but out of necessity, out of nostalgia for something I would never have once more, in an attempt to regain the faintest sense of what was. But I no longer wanted to breathe poison, I no longer wanted to crave something that killed me.
And so, I thought it only fitting to end my longstanding vice the same way I began it. I went to the place I smoked my first cigarette and kissed him for the first time. I bought the same brand and variety I smoked all those years ago. I stood at the same spot where we would take cigarette breaks, just outside our friend’s garage.
I stood there alone, unlike I had always done back then. I savored every bitter inhale, every exhale. When I was done, I extinguished it with my shoes. For one last time, I looked at that house and tried to burn it in my memory, because I would no longer go back.
Quitting smoking when I was years deep into it was somehow easier than quitting a person who had left me with nothing but heaps of ashes. But I did both anyway, and I swear I will never return to either vice.
I breathe clean air now; I can only hope the same for him.
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Aleksei Rivamonte, 22, is a budding writer from Valenzuela City. She recently completed the second year of her journalism degree at the University of Santo Tomas.