Every once in a great while I’ll indulge in a clove cigarette – and I mean a great while; I’ve been milking the same pack of cloves for ten years now. They’ve long since gone stale, but that doesn’t matter. I don’t do it out of any desire for fine tobacco, rather for the scent, the sweet taste, and the evoking of memories from falls long ago.
When I tried my first clove, probably thirty years ago, I smoked to be social, and also with an eye for the self-destruction I found so glamorously attractive in those foolish, reckless, dumb days. When the world got you down, there was some small recompense in the brief seizing of your lungs, the slightest push – a nudge really – just a little closer toward death. Tiny acts of annihilation, safe bits of wreckage that could largely go unnoticed in the grand scheme of things; it was easy to disguise one’s degradation if you did it in socially-sanctioned ways. Easier still to disguise a long arc ending in devastation if you knew how to do such things quietly, without a commotion.
Could someone be that calculating, that precisely orchestrated, leaving not one moment to whim or chance or destiny? Who would plan and plot and perfectly execute such a diabolical plan, and see it through to the very end? Only the most jaded and utterly unaffected monster could come up with such a blueprint, poring over it and revising it, night after night, beneath a haze of sweet smoke.
These days, smoking is decidedly not cool or healthy (and vaping is even more ridiculous). Both are rat poison, as my brother and I once recorded in a home-made tape intended to help my Uncle stop smoking. Spoiler alert: it failed. Still, on certain fall days, when the heart is downtrodden, and the wind has shifted to alert us that summer is irrevocably over, I’ll light a clove, feel the little ache and burn, and remind myself that once I was a silly idiot.
