It is so warm. I can feel the sun slathering my skin gold. The bright light fills the air. Saturated. The grass is itchy and each blade is distinctly green reaching towards the sun. The green is contagious; you can smell it in the air. With the saturated light and fresh smell, it’s surprising you can also fit in the whiff of chemicals swirling from the lighted cigarette in the long fingers of the woman currently sitting to my left. The cigarette embers were orange pulsating lung cancer and gold triggering that smoke dancing in the summer air. If that woman were not there, this would have been a moment of sanctity, a moment of peace. I looked at her long; studying the curl of her fingers gripping the cigarette her lazy pink nails chipping at ends and the cuts on her cuticles. Then I sighed, heavy. I reached to my side, zippered open my bag. The zipper sound broke the silence like a thousand glass figurines falling to the floor.
“Can you light me up?” I asked holding my own thin white Newport to my lips. The flame licked the end of the cigarette, becoming feisty and biting the chemicals to a slow mournful glow.
I exhaled, smoke curling through gold, “Man I just wish I could quit,” I huffed. She smiled, her yellow teeth under pouty pink lips.
“I have like a thousand times” her lips then became pursed, yellow teeth hiding under bubblegum pillows, as if I had something wrong, “My ma just died from lung cancer ya know it? That should be a warning sign if any, but I never was the sharpest crayon in the box.” Teeth make an appearance, simple and friendly, not genuine.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I say. That’s what you always say. Sorry. I just met this chick; I didn’t cause her mother’s death. But it fell out of my mouth, a ton of bricks. The truth of human interactions; the law of grievances.
“It wasn’t your fault. Smoked too much. Guess I got that from her.” She took in another long draw, as if to spite the heavens and her mother. She read my thoughts, understanding in strangers, “We all die anyway” There it was. Plain as the day before me, the world around me, the ground under me, plain as the white shirt I was wearing and the bird singing there in that tree- We all die anyway.
Agreeing in silence we both took a long drag from our cigarettes. We exhaled in unison watching the smoke intertwine and dance, connection of strangers.
“I’ve never admitted that before,” nervous laugh, “and it was to a stranger. What’s your name anyway? Never see you in these parts before” She looked at me tapping the cigarette ashes fluttering to the ground, a storm of cinder butterflies.
“Are you from ‘these parts’?” I mimicked. I wasn’t letting myself out of the bag that easily. I liked the secrecy of identity. It makes it special, important.
“You caught me. I’m from nowhere near here. Here for the pops, ya know. He’s not getting on to well without ma. My sisters are all busy doing only god knows what, so I’m here.”
We’re all there, here, where? Near.
