rolling papers
I always remember myself as having been twenty-two even though by then I had to have been twenty-three, because it was late September and I had been talking to someone else back then, anyway, someone who was a social smoker but didn't come with her own ordnance, not like the person I was looking at now, who had brought burnt umber hair and purple rolling papers. It always struck me as impressive, and a little surprising, that the meticulousness of her habit extended down to the level of the rolling paper, a degree of granularity that would have felt almost counterproductive if it hadn't come across artisanal. I remember it being dark purple, either Serbian or Croatian, picked up during a quick pass of her own or from a friend who'd done the same-- that part I don't recall-- but the clear picture was of someone whose fingers knew well the feeling of rolling papers, and who by then could distinguish between them by taste, smell, and texture, a sommelier of wood pulp and tar and arsenic. At the time I was an infrequent smoker, perhaps clinching one five or six times a year, always off someone else, though that number crept up for a time, and it's hard not to draw a causal link between what became almost a habit and the look of that purple rolling paper held in steady, veteran hands. She always rolled for the two of us, an economic imbalance, a cost to her in tobacco and labour. I didn't complain about either as she handed me a lilac cylinder of Spanish tobacco and lit me first-- I was struck by the chivalry of that; how exotic, Spanish tobacco, in Serbian paper-- before lighting her own. We had been talking the whole time. Usually they go quiet, the veterans, when they roll, fixated as if with needlework on the intricacies of folding, licking, rolling little strips of translucent paper. If anything, she had started talking more, doubly fascinating because, at any time or place, I was typically the one to talk the most, but also because the ritual of rolling seemed to centre her thoughts and sharpen them, as if the otherwise anodyne act of rolling was the lens through which she was focused, somehow, into someone incisive and interrogative, someone who sourced their paper from half a continent away just because she said she liked the taste. It's a microscopic act of suicide, rolling and smoking tobacco, romantic in a world with cancer warnings, mundane in a world without them. To light one is to commit a dangerous and rebel act, pretensions that didn't come to me at the time. I had no Hegelian theory for the act of smoking. I thought about the reddish-brown locks of hair framed by the scarlet light of a low-flying sun, the curls that caught fickle reflections from the flames that came first from the candle, and then from her lighter. It was the first time I noticed the constellation of freckles around her cheekbones. It was the first time I noticed the pallid, unblemished skin of a forehead that never tanned. Her laughs, which came freely and often, were full-toothed, warm, occasionally eclipsed by the smouldering stump of a violet cigarette, a cigarette wrapped in purple rolling papers.