Yearlong Song Challenge, Day 9: Allison

Prompt: "A song involving the smoking of one or more cigarettes"

Selected by Allison

"America"

First Aid Kit

single, 2014

(Note: this is likely the first of many covers that I heard first and liked better than the original.)

Sorry, Simon & Garfunkel, these lyrics work better with two female voices. It evokes memories of the female friendships I built in my late teens / early twenties. Smoking wasn't the only thing connecting us—these friendships would have existed without that common bond. But if you've never bonded over a cigarette, you just don't get it, man*.

The first. In the summer between high school and college, I spent many nights at her mother's house (a child of divorce, her mom was an aggressive "cool mom" type). Our nights mainly consisted of chain-smoking indoors, getting high, and drinking boxed wine out of coffee mugs. We'd talk about life, love, our dreams, the art we needed to make. We'd watch movies, listen to music, write poetry. I'd pass out on a brown leather couch. "Oh, her mom smokes indoors," I'd tell my parents with an aloof shrug when I'd return home, absolutely stinking.

The second. We met two or three days into college. We didn't bond over cigarettes. She didn't smoke as openly or brazenly as I did. But we would drive around in my shitty car singing and smoking. We still get together and share the occasional cigarette. Just don't tell our husbands.

The third and fourth. We lived together in Kensington the summer I turned 21. More specifically, they lived together in Kensington, and I paid them $20 a month to sleep on a futon mattress on the floor for three months. I'm still not sure how I convinced my parents to let me do this. We spent that summer smoking the cheapest cigarettes you could get from the corner store. Everything was communal—cigarettes, beer, weed—between us and the rotating cast of misfits that came through that apartment. Nights were spent in our little concrete backyard, drinking, smoking, and laughing the hardest I have ever laughed in my life.

You could remove cigarettes from all of these memories, and they would still exist, but they wouldn't be the same.

*Smoking is bad, not cool, and you shouldn't do it. But if you have one...