A brief history of darts in the body

I don’t remember the first time I smoked, I only know that I did. There was a time before my first cigarette, just as there was a time before my first drink, my first joint, my first missing memory. My lungs knew clean air once, but that was so long ago, and now they wear the memories of the years left on them to remind me of where we have been.

In the early 1990s I sat in science class in junior high and watched a circle of impossibly cool girls sitting in a disorganized oval on the lawn in front of our school. They sat out there singing Oasis’ “Don’t Look Back in Anger” with each other while passing shared cigarettes around between their fingers. I wanted to be them more than I wanted anything. I wanted to know how it felt to have fingers and voices like theirs, ones that held cigarettes and sang don’t look back in anger, I heard you say in joyful communion.

I bought (What’s The Story) Morning Glory first, and started smoking sometime after that. As if cigarettes and Brit pop were the gateway to a life I wanted but had no words to describe. Transness was an idea that was not yet been written down for me, barely teased as possible, but I wanted to find the trick to unlock it all the same. As if desired identity could be rolled tight in delicate paper, all toxic and beautiful, and inhaled into the body. I loved Oasis too, the same as any group of much cooler girls who sat on the lawn did, but I loved them on my own. In my bedroom and in headphones. In the discman rattling around in my pocket while I wandered in the woods on the way to school. While I spent time in my head and wondered about who I might be if I could be anyone.

I started smoking, and I don’t remember the first one at all, but that is often the way of firsts. I started drinking too, and these two ideas colluded into the great lie of I only smoke when I drink, which sounds like a safe habit if you never discuss how frequently drinking happens. For years, we smoked inside because we were comfortable enough with our inherent desire to destroy ourselves and our clothes. We smoked in restaurants with careful lattice sections above chairs clad in cracked pleather that separated the haves from the have-nots. Smoked in the bar that delivered packs of cigarettes when asked with every new round of Molson Black Label, the cheapest beer you could buy that didn’t taste entirely like a houseplant died in a glass of water left on a bedside table overnight. It was so easy to smoke inside, it was so frequently paired with desire, that how could you not?

I remember the day they banned smoking inside better than I do the day I had my first cigarette. Legislation came down that took the flame on our lips away from us, in the dead of a Yukon winter, and so we huddled in front of doors pulled shut. Doors covered in sheets of ice left created by layers of dense and immovable moisture, the molecules of lives we left behind frozen to the glass. It was 42 degrees below zero and suddenly if we wanted to smoke we had to brave the elements to do so and the habit became less urgent for many. Smoking became a test to how deep into the body the nicotine ran. I smoked less when I drank, but did not mention the frequency of drinking when asked.

I smoked on job sites and in work vehicles on the way to them. Blasted darts on the top of an in-progress grocery superstore after climbing a shaky ladder with my hands full of tools, desperately gripping with what fingers I could to the cold metal rungs to join the crew waiting at the top. We sat on the edge of the roof as the sun rose slowly over the mountains in the distance, felt the crisp, cold wind of the morning on our faces as we drank coffee, made idle chatter over the radio struggling to hold its signal and looked at the day ahead.

I smoked at trade school when our teacher yelled “smoke em if you got 'em” and knew it was a good opportunity to stand around in the designated smoking area and trade stories with men who lived wildly bigger lives than mine. Stories told with wild laughter, accented by steel toes grinding cigarette butts into the cracked pavement.

I smoked with a former partner on her patio while we drank room temperature beer and watched people on the street below. Letterman on TV in the background, blending with the sounds of cars testing the speed limit. I quit when the cancer that spread to her lungs claimed her at 25.

I quit for a long time, except for the rare times that I let myself have one if the mood was right, or I wanted to grasp at something. Some nights, the yearning to be someone else got too loud, and a cigarette would help burn the idea into the body. I sat on a patio the year after I quit and smoked just one that became an entire pack, exhaustingly drunk on mid-tier red wine, listening to Death Cab for Cutie and waited for the sun to come back and let us feel spring and summer on our skin again.

I didn’t start smoking in earnest again until I was in my 30s, on the street in Hamburg with my hands full of beer, saying “this is the kind of city you could really smoke a cigarette in.” Suddenly, I owned two packs of soon-to-be-empty American Spirits purchased for a fair price at a German convenience store. I smoked in between rounds of meat cooked on giant metal plates on the street, and in business meetings on patios in busy clubs while bands I can’t remember played on a small stage in the distance.

I don’t remember my first, but I remember my second first, then the third and fourth. I quit and then thought about smoking endlessly when I walked by people having private darts on the street. I imagined my fingers holding a cigarette same as them. Don’t look back in anger and all the yearning to be the perfect idea of someone. The thought haunted me for minutes that sometimes became days. Occasionally, I gave in, until I got COVID for the second time and my lungs never quite bounced back. I quit then for good, and it was the only time it was ever easy to walk away from it. In all the years since that first time I don’t remember, I have grown into a life that I desired, and it dawned on me that I could lose it just as it is getting good.

Cigarette smoke has been left on the walls of my lungs like wallpaper. Something that was once so beautiful, placed there with reckless confidence years ago in hopes that it would be the change the room needed, now fading and peeling away. Remnants of time passed. The memory of wanting to be one of the girls singing Oasis on the lawn outside of school. Stories about early mornings and late evenings. Memories frozen to me like so much ice on the door. It’s easy to think of it all as damage left behind, but I would rather think of it as time I am fortunate to still remember.