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ccrossstitchh · 5 months ago

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I tell my friends I don’t smoke. That is not strictly true, anymore. I don’t smoke often enough, in my opinion, for it to matter, a pack split between me and my best friend lasts us for at least a couple of months. I tell people I don’t smoke, but my best friend knows that is a lie, a lie she lives with me, too. Because smoking is more than the burn of the smoke in your lungs, the ashy taste in your mouth, and sometimes it is all you need.

On nights out we bring the pack with us, light on up as we move from bar to bar. A conversation starter, a conversation holder, keep us warm in the cold city night. Passed back and forth. We don’t need to talk with a cigarette. Fingers slipping, the drinks and the nicotine making it harder, so we laugh as it goes between us. We can just look at each other, the intimacy and love passing across to us with each turn we take, and we don’t need to talk because we are doing something together. We feel its desired effect; something to make us older, cooler, to show the men walking by; look at us, all grown up.

A cigarette split between friends is hardly dangerous at all. It feels like connection, a tether, between potential acquaintances, a pull that starts something more. Passed back and forth, back and forth, lips to lips, fingers to fingers, something to hold people together to the point you have to start talking. A moment of reprieve of a claustrophobic inside gathering, something to take you outside into the quiet, a cigarette can be a beginning. I sat out on a deck, of a person I don’t really know too well, and shared a cigarette with a close friend of mine and someone I sort of knew from high school. In another situation, this conversation could have been stilted, they being long time friends, I so could have easily slid to the outside, saying barely anything at all, as I do in those situations. But we were all there, doing the same thing, passing a cigarette back and forth, lips to lips, and the shared intimacy and the certainty that truly, we were not so different, made it easy. We sat and talked and laughed, and no conversation flowed as fluently as smoke, like a conversation with a cigarette.

A cigarette alone is a moment outside alone. In times of stress, you have the perfect excuse of a moment alone outside. When I feel like I am going insane, I open my secret box of cigarettes, take my bright red lighter, messily covered in Barbie stickers, and open the door. It is time to breathe. The smoke feels like hating, sure, the chemicals in my lungs feel sticky and hazy, but I let the nicotine wash over me and everything feels quiet.

I don’t smoke much, no. Not so often that I can’t feel the full wash of it, let my head go slightly dizzy as I look to the sky, look to the other person, look at my best friend, and smile. It is a bad habit, sometimes it feels like hate, but it is confidence, connection, a moment of quiet. Sometimes all I can ever want is given to me in a cigarette.

#writing #my writing #cigarette #smoking is bad for you #i love my friends #specifically my best friend #friends #love #being 19 #disappointing my parents

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ccrossstitchh · 9 months ago

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loserdom: an actual word

The state or condition being a loser.

Spring of 2024 was the first time in my life I actually felt like a loser. I’d had low points before, naturally, as do all teenagers, specifically teenage girls, do. But none had felt as deliciously lonely as those months nearly the end of my first year at university. It wasn’t a low point as such; I was bordering on an unhappiness, but had yet to cross it. But loserdom; that was the region I had steadily crossed into, with the decline of my time being spent with actual other people. Gone was the end of summer and early autumn that I had so treasured, one filled with nights out, alcohol, gossip, and tears, a perpetual state of change in emotions. No, my new spring was actually perpetual. It was spent alone.

Now, saying I was a loser who spent all my time alone was a disservice to one person and one person alone; my best friend, *****. But she was back home, I was here, and no amount of texting and calling would change the fact that I had barely any actual friends in Kirikiriroa. Besides, she and I had both declared we were losers, separately, which brings forth the logical conclusion that the addition of one loser to another does not change one’s already dire social position. So, loser.

My experience in halls, I felt, was very much shared with a lot of my peers, but the nature of it meant that it felt unique to me. Surrounded by others my age, teenagers, almost adults, young people, all going through the same but different things, it should’ve been easy to not feel alone. But the solid concrete walls that physically separated our rooms did more than just that. I could always hear voices and footsteps from the halls and others’ rooms, but these walls felt so confining and immobilizing that it was very rare for me to actually venture out to see what was happening. It did the same to most others; I knew that as I walked up and down the hallway, that most others would be listening to me pass their door, but never got up to open it. We were all together, yet sometimes it felt that I was the only one to live and reside and sleep in my room.

The leftover residue from high school was yet to leave us, and I do credit that to how isolating university felt. The desire to be cool, look cool, the fear of others, approaching them, talking to them, being judged by them, was still so present in all of our minds, most solitary people kept to themselves. It was funny, we would all cram into one room for three meals a day, all three hundred of us over the space of an hour and a half, everyday, and yet I never once used any of those opportunities to sit and meet someone new. I don’t think anyone else did either. I sat with the same two groups of people I knew, and when I didn’t, I sat by myself.

Social media made whatever I was feeling a thousand times worse. Seeing my few long distance friends not reply to my messages and then the next second on Instagram with their new university besties hurt, even when I knew they had it as rough as I did. Seeing random girls from high school, old acquaintances, people I barely knew living the life I had imagined for myself only drove the hurt deeper. Nevermind that I knew social media was a fabrication; a carefully constructed story of what people want you to think, I still felt so far behind everyone else. The thing that hurt me the most, I believe, was my assured awareness of the dangers and problems of the issues I was facing.

I thought I knew what I was dealing with when it came to envy, social media, friends, etc. This perceived awareness meant that I failed to see how badly these things were hurting me until it was too late, because I believed myself to be too smart to fall into the same trap that others had before me. Surprise, surprise, this only made everything worse in the end. And, turns out, you cannot avoid these coming of age lessons by being smart; like all hard things in life, you only learn the lesson by going through it. Hindsight has always been 20/20.

The full acceptance and relish of my new statehood came from one thing; getting off my phone. It was hard, and it had taken me the better part of four years to finally get where I am now. Everytime a lull in my day would come, the urge to reach for my phone or something to scroll would make itself present. I could feel the eye in my mind looking, searching, wanting the easy haze of doomscrolling. Those moments were most uncomfortable; my mind felt fuzzy and achy, wanting the familiarity of being able to completely surrender to emptiness. It was a type of restlessness, but eventually I grew to ignore it. Again, this took the better part of four years, but finally, finally, I was able to get off my phone.

Access to the internet had almost become an actual tangible thing in my mind. I saw it above me, almost like a door, a passage, a connection to everyone and everything going on in the world. Because that's what my phone was; the passage to someone or something else. Like a portal, my phone never felt like a flat object when I was watching it, rather something infinite that I could reach into and constantly entertain myself with. When it was gone, I felt blind. For the first time since I was around 13, I was off trend. I was off the algorithm. It is embarrassing to admit how much I relied on social media and my phone to tell me what to do. I used it for inspiration, books to read, things to do, I found music, songs, films to watch, clothes to buy and where. I was constantly moving forward through trends, ideas, consuming what was the new thing each and every day. Now, ever since I had deleted those apps, I felt like I was almost standing still. It felt like the breath was being released from my lungs. A rest.

I could be me again, unfiltered and uninfluenced.

I still feel blind, but I fill this uncertainty with other media. I watch films, read books, draw and stretch. Neglect my studies and the task of finding a summer job for my hobbies. My schedule does not expand to accommodate other people, but the things I, as a child, loved and forgot about. I call my sister and my mother. I go to bed early. I cannot escape my loserdom, and someday soon I will want to, but not now.

This is where the ‘delicious’ part of the deliciously lonely comes in. Delicious, like a delicious burn or pain. Alcohol down my throat or smoke in my lungs. I am a loser in the cool, strange way all movie protagonists are. Mysterious and interesting, alive and beautiful, even if no one sees it. I can be that on my own, with no validation.

Slowly, slowly, did the weight of other people’s thoughts begin to wear off. What I had imagined was them throwing their judgments onto me was really just me throwing them onto myself, pulling their strings and making their mouths move like puppets’, to cast their words like curse onto me. Once I, the puppetmaster, stopped, I failed to see what had even prompted me to begin. These peers of mine that I had been so quick to demonize, easily let me fade from their lives, because ultimately, being a good thing or not, they did not care at all about me.

Last Sunday I sat on the grass and let the feeling of the damp ground beneath me comfort me. I let the smoke of my one cigarette fill my lungs, and the nicotine swirl to my head. I was reading Watership Down, my father’s favorite book, and was thinking of him. I sat, undisturbed, for an hour, thinking, reading, smoking. Alone.

I watch the sunrises and sunsets from my lovely third floor window. I let rabbits and stories comfort me, their faith in their god wash over me. For a few moments, when I look out to the sky and think of Hazel-rah and his Frith, I don’t feel afraid. I watch films like Midnight in Paris, and feel inspired again. In the film, a version of Hemingway proclaims it is only in the moment of the truest love can man escape his truest fear; death. I know this to be true. Nothing will replace the feeling of genuine love and human connection, but for the time being, the love I have for myself and the nature I get to look out to every morning, is enough to placate me.

#writing #my writing #artwork #losercore #summer #spring #funny the girl this is about isn't my friend anymore

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