This past week was such a whirlwind. I read a book a day for 7 days. The first 4 days were nice and I was very much enjoying myself. I had no intention of stopping until I reached day 6 I was about losing my mind just sitting there reading reading reading. It led me to try and quit smoking which was also a failure. The morning I decided I'd quit, I told myself, "After this pack, no more cigarettes!" but by the end of the pack, I decided I'd cut down from 25 cigarettes a day to just 5. I have cut back quite a bit but I'm still in the teens. Yesterday was 13, the day before 14. Hopefully today I can achieve my new goal of 10. I watched a bunch of videos on youtube, vloggers primarily, who talked about quitting smoking. They weren't so good at convincing me but I did enjoy watching them for some reason.
Talking on the phone with Ethan last night, he told me about how his first cigarette was when he was 13 on Avenue A and he was drunk or something. He said he could remember how bad he thought it had tasted. This too was a trend with the Youtube vloggers...about how their first cigarettes were disgusting. I remember my first cigarette was outside the school in Hungary. I was sitting with a girl named Bárbörá who told me that I would have a difficult time making friends if I didn't smoke and of course my 15 year old self wanted so badly to have a few more friends then just being glued to Bárbie. Now as I write this I realize that maybe she wanted me to go make different friends, too. She gave me one of her Marlboro menthols and I have smoked a pack a day till now. Now I am trying for half a pack. I was telling Tess that I want to be able to not have them on me and feel fine...that instead of anxiously worrying about when I run out, I simply just wait till its most convenient for me to go buy some. I count my cigarettes like they are the last thing I have. I hate sharing them. I hate sharing them especially with people who don't smoke. The people you see every single night at the bar who ask you for cigarettes and all the while sitting there continue on about how they quit smoking two years ago. I am vowing now to not become one of those people but I wouldn't be surprised if I did.
I was looking out my stairwell window again but this time it was night and I could see directly into my friend Silvia's apartment. Well, it used to be her apartment up until December that is. Someone bought the building and kicked everyone out. It was the best building. It was like a mansion with a few friends living in it. For some reason though, looking out the stairwell window into what will always be to me, Silvia's kitchen, I didn't feel all that sad or mournful like I usually do about these kind of things. It was actually rather peaceful and those few minutes of staring gave me that painful feeling of wishing everyone could see what I was seeing. Of course it's mundane, two apartment windows, looking into a kitchen. The oven's green clock illegible from my distance but very much there, the round kitchen table by the window with a box of some kind sitting on it, the lamp on the countertop and it's light painting everything in the room gold and yellow...the outside of the building is an alcove of other buildings including mine and 2 others allowing it to resemble at times a sort of European gamut of architecture. Silvia's is Italian with its gray and yellow walls, the apartment between ours is British with it's deep red brick and shutters at each window, my building is more French, and the building across from the British one, between Silvia and I's, is much more Germanic. And to top it all off, the post rain dewey smell was so refreshing, especially now. It was so calming it made me a bit sad, it was like I couldn't see it all well enough because it was so pleasant. It all looked like a Gail Albert Halaban photograph after post-production. I turned my back for maybe one minute and when I turned back around, the lights were off. It's not as sentimental as I'm making it seem to be but it was just something that I really enjoyed. Maybe the best part of my day. I've attached below some good Gail Albert Halaban photos below... :)
The sun is shining so bright this morning so I will try and get my groceries early rather than wait all day as I have been in the habit of postponing anything that requires labor of any kind...Warmth to u all!
-m.
