Here's to you, O Fellow Smoker, sitting in your plastic chair and sparking up a fag, just like me, right outside your apartment door, just like me, not ten feet away from me, not three drags ahead or behind me. Here's to you, determinedly looking away--but for surreptitiously curious glances--from every other living thing, just like me, and fiercely refusing, like me, to make conversation. Inevitably, one of us stands to leave, glancing awkwardly, nearly apologetically, at the five or six others also indulging in our sick, carcinogenic ritual. someone grunts, unimpressed, in dismissal and the cigarette-finisher leaves. Heres to us, the cancerous isolationists; may our silence weigh heavier with every drag and may it not be quelled with the snubbing of the cherry.
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