To the Smoker on 72nd Street
I met you in the heat of the afternoon. The clouds were drowning in a blue-glass sky, and New York stretched on all around. Cars, stuck in a traffic parade, honked for attention, and dogs let their tongues roll out from behind their teeth.
I was on fire. I hadn’t slept the night before. I’d stayed awake baking cake after cake, each one pinker than the last, and obsessing over ways to rearrange the alphabet until I had to go to class. It felt possible to create a new color, a new language.
Most adults with bipolar disorder have eight manic episodes in their lifetime, but I was twenty-one and this was my eighth. I’d been running on self-made electricity all week.
I headed for you before you even saw me coming. I stepped out of the deli on 72nd street after winking at the cashier and stuffing my one-dollar water bottle into the gaping throat of my backpack, all my neurons glittering at once, my bleached-blonde hair billowing behind me like a flag. You were standing on the street corner by the trash can and bike stalls, peering at the face of your phone, smirking a bit, your hair a dollop of copper. I wanted to run my hands through it. You held a cigarette between your fingers, the cherry at the end bright and alive. I nearly raced to you, felt like a fridge magnet. Look, the universe has brought me this boy of smoke while I’m burning, I thought. How wonderful.
“Can I have one?” I asked too quickly, the words leaking from my brain out through my mouth. Your eyes flickered over me. You laughed a little, the kind of noise you make once you realize you don’t have to scream.
“Hey, what’s up?” you asked.
“Can I have a cigarette?”
“I only have a couple left,” you said, to which, “No way!” I replied, “Everybody says that but they never mean it.” I bounced on my heels. You were much taller than me, which I found exciting. You laughed again.
“I swear, I mean it.” You looked at me for a moment, and it made me want to ask if you wanted some of my glow, even if it’d make your blood run. Could you hear mine running?
“Alright, here,” you said eventually, digging into your pocket and pulling out your nearly empty box of cigarettes. There really were only two left, jostling around like spare change. You handed one to me and went to fetch your lighter from the opposite pocket. It was blocky and bulletproof silver. Before you could give it to me, it fell from your hands onto the floor with a thud. My mouth bloomed as I laughed like a live studio audience, I couldn’t help it. You chuckled slightly, picked the lighter back up, and lit my cigarette.
“I sat next to a pack of matches on the train this morning,” I said, breath passing through me like a silly straw. “That’s weird, right? They were all in the pack still. Nobody wanted to touch them.”
“That is kind of weird. I guess it’s better than a person,” you said.
“I love people, though!” I sounded like stepping on a grenade.
Then I noticed the freckles beneath your left eye, and I remembered that my friend in high school was obsessed with freckles, that she would poke her cheeks with the tip of an eyeliner pen every morning before school only to have them smear during lunch. I wanted to ask you about high school: Did you also think there couldn’t possibly be a life outside of it? And weren’t you wonderfully surprised when you found out about the world? And aren’t you still a little surprised?
“You looked at me for a moment, and it made me want to ask if you wanted some of my glow, even if it’d make your blood run. Could you hear mine running? ”
I smoked the cigarette, the plumes of smoke coming from my mouth like a malfunctioning machine, as you stared down the avenue. At what exactly? At the orchestra of pedestrians and shops and light? I didn’t know, but I wanted to.
“I’ve stopped smoking a couple of times,” I offered. “But it’s hard to continue not doing something, you know what I mean? It’s harder than just indulging.”
“You should quit again,” you said.
Too soon, the cigarette had wilted to nothing but the filter, and my mouth tasted of salt and husk. I looked up at you, and just then I knew that this precise moment would never exist again; it died as it happened. But I could keep the memory like a band poster on a teenager’s wall, only if I turned to leave.
“Thank you. Really, thanks, thanks, thanks!” I said.
You looked at the ground, your eyebrows furrowed, trying to touch. “Take care of yourself. You’re welcome.”
The following week, my heart deflated once again. It wept in my chest, cradled by my lungs. I stood in that same deli on 72nd street, buying another bottle of water, this time with tons of change. I wasn’t manic anymore. Not even a little. I had felt glorious in that state, but now I remembered my stutter. I apologized to the cashier as I sifted through unlucky pennies. Everything I did felt humiliating. As I took my receipt, you walked in. You smiled.
“Hey,” you said, your finger brushing the edge of my backpack as you passed by me to the fridge. My eyes widened involuntarily as we looked at each other, but I couldn’t speak. You’d been another lucky-dream-soulmate. You gave a cigarette to a champion and thought you’d found her again.
I shivered and walked out. I wasn’t the one you were looking for.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jasmine Ledesma lives in New York. Her work has appeared in places such as Crab Fat Magazine, Ruminate, and The Southampton Review, among others. She recently won the John Costello Award in creative nonfiction.
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Header photo by Spencer Imbrock