The Long Reach of Longing
Smoking & parting ways
In a recent workshop, I offered Mary Biddinger’s poem, Heaven and Its Static, and suggested we write about a time when either the self or a character parted ways with a former self. As the poem suggested, there may be moments when we long for the one we once were.
My invitation to you is to read the poem and see what it inspires in you, whether it be for yourself or a character you’re working with.
Here’s what I came up with…
In film and television shows set in the seventies, it seems everyone is smoking. Personally, I think they overdo it—the smoking—perpetually lighting up, stamping down (a great gesture, by the way, to indicate fed-upness/determination, etc.). I mean, did everyone smoke in those days? Besides, it’s obvious those actors aren’t actually smoking. They aren’t taking the long, soulful drags I recall. They’re not modelling the poetry of smoking or the solace of it. No one rests their elbow on an arm folded under the breasts in order to brandish the cigarette—that familiar pose that seemed so elegant.
“You look good with a cigarette,” one chef in a restaurant where I worked once commented. Because I knew how to hold a cigarette, and how to keep it between my lips long enough to fill my lungs.
Decades have passed since that final cigarette, years since I was her—that woman at the bar with carmine lips and double-rod perm, red Dunhill holder, and sometimes the one with the gold-tipped black Sobranie.
You may have guessed that I haven’t entirely parted ways with her. I miss those evenings when conscientious waiters would set a clean ashtray upside-down over the full one to slide it away so the ashes didn’t darken the white tablecloth. I miss lingering over a brandy, a Calvados, or something sweet like a small slender glass of Amaretto, with Helen or Leatrice or Barbara, talking poetry, art, or men, two plumes of smoke curling overhead.
In movies or TV, they smoke when they’re afraid, stressed, or angry. I smoked at those times as well, but more often for the sheer pleasure of it. For the warmth in the throat, the taste of earth, the rush of blood with the day’s first cigarette. I don’t blame those actors for not inhaling. That shit’s bad for you—even the organic American Spirit I’d order for a healthy alternative. (Those buggers scorched my lungs.)
When my husband and I parted ways, and after having not smoked for several years, I’d begun to smoke one or two after dinner. Those nights followed years of struggle and relentless effort to maintain, and this was my time to recalibrate and reconcile. After my son was in bed, I would go out into the quiet night to gaze up into the sky and listen to the night sounds of crickets and the occasional whippoorwill or coyote, and draw in the settling smoke.
My son found me with a cigarette between my fingers, a lighter in hand. He was seven years old. He cried, “I don’t want you to die.”
That was the moment I parted ways with cigarettes.
I promised myself I would continue to go out by the river each night just to watch the moon rise and the stars pop out, to listen for coyotes and the whippoorwill. I was sure I would keep my date with the night.
I was so sure.
Again, my invitation is for you to respond to Mary Biddinger’s poem however it lands for you—with a poem or piece of prose. What I know about writing from prompts is that they can take you into places you never imagined you’d write about. And sometimes, those pieces turn into longer pieces, sometimes even full-length memoirs or novels. I’d love to read what you come up with!