Djarum Blacks—those are what he smoked, with a crackle, and then a luxurious sweet exhale of smoke that you can taste on the tip of your tongue. I heard from someone that clove cigarettes are worse for your lungs than regular cigarettes, more tar I think. He laughed when I told him, and then chided me for my own bad habits, with a wink, of course. The cigarette itself was black, and he liked that. I didn’t know anyone else who smoked black cigarettes. “Classy,” he called it, in the self-ironic way he always carried himself. God I loved him.
Let’s stay like this, one of us said, as the August sun began to sink behind the trees. He leaned against his car in his leather jacket, me against him, and lit another cigarette. I was leaving for college in a week, a new life that would be a plane flight away in Washington D.C., and he would stay here. Let’s not think about it, neither of us needed to say, but I wrapped my hands under his jacket and pulled on his shirt anyway, fruitlessly trying to make him closer. To make me stay.
I inhaled the exotic smoke and tasted it. I still have that, today, every time I smell a black cigarette, it’s him.
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I think a huge part of the sex appeal of cigarettes is the smell of cigarette smoke; maybe it was originally something we saw that we were attracted to, but it's the smell that we remember most vividly.
When you smell a certain scent it feels as though you slipped back in time and that you are actually at that scene again. If it was not for the other senses of your body, you might really feel as though you are back there again. But why is it that smell has this ability to instantaneously trigger memories of events, places or people that you usually would not "think" of?
-Smell and Memory by Shigeyuki Ito
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