Smoking.

This piece was originally published on my old website.

Lissa liked Kundera and E.M. Forster. “Only connect.”

About a month into her first year in the dorm for transfer students, a bunch of us went to a neighborhood bar.

She talked about the years she was a nanny to a rich Chicagoan and about how she’d had to sit in the bathroom for an entire flight on his private jet. She had carried a basketball signed by Michael Jordan on her lap, in the bathroom, because there hadn’t been a seat for her.

I had smoked one cigarette before that night, one swiped from my grandmother’s brown vinyl cigarette case when I was 11. It had made me nauseated.

Lissa smoked socially, she said, which was something I had never heard of. I figured I could smoke socially. With beer, smoking was fantastic and I kind of fell into a crush with Lissa.

I drank a lot of beer that night, and she flirted with some other guy, and within a few months I sort of eventually figured out that I was never going to get anywhere with Lissa, mostly because I was awkward and unworldly.

But I smoked pretty much nonstop for 10 years.