Autobiography in 5 Cigarettes

I love the smell of cigarettes. Not to smoke them.

For cigarettes smell like the Upstairs Flat, where I learned the definition of friendship, beyond the six word long explanation I found in my children's dictionary. Where I learned that watching rated R pictures can give you nightmares about hockey masked men slashing beautiful women to chunks of dripping red meat. That empty closets and deserted backyards host to a plethora of scientific discoveries. Cigarettes smell like roly polies dug fresh from the playground dirt -the roly polies I felt struggling for freedom from the confines of my throat- spanking new rollerblades from Toys-r-Us, and French fries at McDonalds bought with this week’s allowance money.

For cigarettes smell like uncle, who taught me to blend pastel colors with my fingers and to pencil drawings. How to make them resemble something in real life. The smell wafted alongside me on Confirmation day; uncle was my sponsor*. That day, the lemon incense swam upwards towards the arched cathedral ceiling in curlicues and chalky clouds, blurring the plain air enough to be fit for Something Divine.

For cigarettes smell like middle school crushes, with an exhilaration unique to the first. (Cue: Awwww.) He went to the gifted school, and did both football and tap. Green hair and Red eyes. Maybe the other way around. Was he a Billy? or John? Tom? or a Mike? Maybe Connor or Raheem or Miguel. For certain, my first kiss smelled of cigarette smoke (and the  drugstore cologne he masked it with). I eagerly inhaled this gaseous cocktail of tweenage suburbia with short, giddy breaths for two whole weeks before forgetting him and his name.

For cigarettes smell like growing up. In the eighth floor girl’s bathroom, where youths painted their faces with eyeliner and lipgloss in sacred ritual. Tobacco smoke was the incense. Gossip and cussing were the holy incantations. In the eighth floor girl’s bathroom on the first day of high school.

For cigarettes smell like a world outside my own. Where I learned the warmth of familial love with my cousins in metro-Manila**. I had their eyes; they had my nose. We observed the the work of nature's Dr. Frankenstein in our shared features because we had nothing else in common.

I love the smell of cigarettes. Not for the tobacco. Not for the flavour.

For cigarettes are a background installment in my memories, like the color of the wallpaper in the Upstairs Flat, or the way the sweaty palms of Billy or Mike or Raheem or Pablo felt squeezed against my skin.

For the air doesn't smell like them anymore.