Peninsula letters

March 3rd, 2017

Dear MJ,

I’m 25 years old and (uh, surprise!) I don’t smoke, it’s not a religious issue, and it’s just that smoking isn’t my thing. Believe me: I tried. When I was 17, I stole some cigarettes from my mom’s hidden package more than once and went to an ally next to the bathroom. Smoke got into my lungs and I never kept it, I let it all out and one of those times my aunt thought the house was on fire.
Walking down the street is a common thing until a cigarette smell wakens me; it reminds me of you, your house and the peninsula. In my time, I realized that ‘home’ is those two places, mainland and peninsula, grandma and you. Now that I’ve grown up, and I live away from my parents, I’ve felt tempted to buy a whole package of cigarettes, just to think about you and laugh to all those good memories that I tend to forget.
Kids these days complain a lot about smokers; maybe we belong to that time when fire was lit without an alarm turning on. After work, in a bar, I find air conditioning pretty suffocating; I got drunk and ran outside, ‘Can someone have a smoke? I’m choking here’. Since then I seek places where I can have a beer under a shadowy tree, open air where drunk fellas light cigarettes. Smoking comes as catharsis, when you smoke around me it comes with joy or bitter disappointment, it comes with remembrance of great times in the past or the uncertainty of the future. Yet it never comes alone: smoke doesn’t come from nothingness.

XXOO,
Jair