Djarum Blacks (LessRealButMoreRealistic)

Exiting an elevator has come to be a point of relief for me, as I can’t help pointing out how awkward the forced meetings that take place within make me feel, either through simply saying it or sheepishly avoiding eye contact. I slowly exhaled as the mirrored doors opened and sat back to let everyone else leave first, then lit a cigarette just before pushing through the double doors leading outside. Immediately at my side was an acquaintance from the dorms, pinching between thumb and forefinger a black clove, smoked probably only as a matter of distinguishment. The cigarettes themselves spark as one drags on them and leave the tongue feeling strangely numb, which is why I find it hard to take anyone who smokes them seriously. I was reminded of the insistence with which I would promote their scent’s similarity to that which flows nebulously from the kitchen to waft and awaken my brothers and I on a winter holiday, and the stark contrast between that image and the chaotic experiences I can only associate the cigarettes themselves to distracted me from the actual content of my companion’s conversation.
I hadn’t had a black in several months, had actually avoided them on purpose after coughing up black and red lung butter the morning following smoking a whole pack. The night hadn’t been stressful in any emotional sense, only in that way which comes with the attempt to ride out a poorly planned evening. We had the fortune to arrive near the end of that period after the opening and introductory drinks had been mixed and before the different cliques split off around the fire pit. It was fortunate because this was also the point at which the empty semicircle of discomfort could be seen around whichever surface was being used to roll blunts. This had come to be a nice signal for the few of us who recognized it within the group of dudes cobbled together from those confused souls still remaining in Idaho Falls after high school which we drank beers with, most of whom came to appreciate our different perspective from a comfortable distance, and it wasn’t until about an hour later when I realized that our arrival time had predicted a poor order of consumption. I had at this point already smoked at least half of the pack and put away a tenth of my body weight in that particular draught which allegedly won a blue ribbon so long ago, when I was suddenly vomiting on top of the cigarette I’d just lit. As with the mythological correct order for drinking beers and liquor, there is a correct order to attaining a stable mixture of different intoxicants, and in my haste I‘d broken it. After suffering the consequences I simply gave up for the night, and during the long ride home I smoked the last eight or so in a recovery state, drunkenly depositing the box in the gutter a block from my house.
It wasn’t even the events of the night that bothered me, they simply served to give context to my distaste for those harsh pseudo-cigarettes. I had felt more personally offended by how I’d been inspired to speak of their seeming healing abilities just the night before, when mere hours later I awoke rubbing dry mucus from my eyes with one hand while the other caught an entirely different form of the same stuff.