There was a brief time in my life when I thought I might smoke cigarettes. I thought I might “be a smoker”. It was the beginning of my junior year at Bard: I had just knit my first pair of leggings, cut my hair short and dyed it black, and had recently discovered boys’ baseball shirts and lace headbands. I sincerely doubted that I would ever feel this pretty again.

Some context:

1. 1. A year before The Day I Considered Smoking had been notable due to a conversation I had with my then-new-boyfriend Adam, in which I informed him that every time I saw him smoking, it was like watching him vomit all over himself. “It’s absolutely repulsive,” I told him. “There is literally nothing more disgusting you could do in front of me.”
2. 2. The day before The Day I Considered Smoking, I’d seen a kid speeding on his bicycle down the hill from the cafeteria to our campus center, buck naked. “Wheeee!” he’d cried.
3. 3. I had spent the first part of The Day I Considered Smoking unpacking and arranging my closet. If there’s one thing sure to put me in a good mood, and thus open to terrible ideas, it’s a well-arranged closet.

“Hey, Adrianne!” Adam called to me from across the quad. “Do you want to come with Tony and me to the tobacco shop in Rhinebeck?”

Hell. Yes.

I could start with cloves, I decided — those sweet cinnamon sticks nobody was supposed to inhale. The brown paper crackling between my fingers, I would have a reason to stand outside in the winter months, surrounded by my comrades bundled in sweaters with hands like ice. I could stare into the distance meaningfully, or un-meaningfully. Everywhere I went, I would be followed by the scent of campfire and chai. You could ask me for a light! All my nonsmoking life, I’ve wanted to be asked for a light.

Hell. Yes.

We piled into Tony’s car and lurched out of the dirt parking lot, filling the cool air with dust.

It’s one of those moments that I replay often, in certain moods: the impulsiveness of it, that sudden shift from closet arranging into journey/adventure, two people whom I had missed desperately those past few months just sitting in the front seat as Anita O’Day crooned through the speakers, the trees of upstate New York spreading their arms over Route 9, everything crimson and gold paper fluttering around us like confetti. Sing, sing, sing, sing. Everybody’s got to sing. Rhinebeck is ahead, and important life decisions: will I smoke cloves or roll my own cigarettes, will I be a matches or a Zippo kind of girl, which glass jar will ensnare me for life with its aromatic promises of grandeur?

It is the last time I can remember feeling thrilled by the simple reality of a friend’s driver’s license. That freedom and joy, to just be in a car together, debating destinations, routes, stops along the way. Anything is possible and everything is beautiful, on that drive to Rhinebeck.

I had brought a book with me to the doctor’s appointment. The wait is rarely long at all for my doctor, but books seem to break the ice. “What are you reading?” they’ll ask. “What is it about?”

The doctor at the Women’s Center had gotten a blank, disinterested look on her face when I presented her with The V Book, and I took this as the most information I’d gotten out of her that entire appointment. “I thought you were a gynecologist,” I said. “No,” she said. “Then why am I being billed for a specialty appointment?” I could have said. “Why are either of us here at all?”

But this time, I was not at the Women’s Center, I was down the street: because when things go wrong for long enough in one part of your body, other parts follow suit. The nurse led me to the scale.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“Because it hasn’t gotten better, it’s gotten worse,” I said.

“What is that book?”

She nodded at the floor, where Samuel Johnson is Indignant rested on top of my purse.

“Short stories.”

I rolled up my sleeve. She was still staring at the book, stethoscope in hand. “Is it you?” she suddenly asked.

“What?”

“The picture on the cover. That woman! It is, isn’t it? You.”

I looked down, picked the book up.

“No . . .” I said. “That’s a picture of a statue.” I didn’t tell her it was a picture of a statue of the Virgin Mary, because I wasn’t sure if that was embarrassing, not to recognize a statue of the Virgin Mary.

“Not a painting?”

“I’m pretty sure it’s a photograph . . . I suppose it could be either, though. The lines are very soft.”

“Let me see it closer,” she said. I handed her the book, and she stood there, one set of fingers on my pulse, the other grasping that book, and she looked back and forth between my face and the cover, back and forth. “It is a painting,” she declared. “It is a painting of your face.”

When I was fifteen years old, I only loved musicians.

Famous musicians, friend musicians, girl musicians and boy musicians, musicians whose faces I’d never even seen. At coffee shop and high-school organized concerts (God, these were always in the cafeteria, how awful) I sat cross-legged over beat-up Candies in the front row, large glossy hearts like heliumized Lisa Frank creations bubbling out of my throat and floating up to the ceiling. I watched their fingers press into each fret and I memorized their facial expressions, and after rushing home I’d write terrible poetry comparing them to delicious cookies.

For better or worse, I didn’t remain long on future-groupie track. No, instead, I clearly remember the chilly November evening in the car when the unplugged version of “Come As You Are” came on the radio. I was leaning my head on a windowpane in the back seat, feeling teenage as usual. The season’s last crumpled leaves swirled and jumped in the pavement, fluttering against the glass and seeming very significant. “No I doooon’t have a gun,” Kurt moaned, reverberating in the depths of the universe and my veins or whatever.

Wait a minute! I thought to myself, what if I did that?

For my 16th birthday, my dad took me to a store, and I picked out — not a gun, but my guitar.

Old Friend, a Little Dusty. (Full album)

Did I ever get lessons? The weird thing is, I don’t actually remember. I always meant to get lessons: it was going to be my potential birthday present from my mom. But I’m pretty sure this never happened. (Not to say anything against her, or maybe it is. Probably it’s something I let slide. Who knows? Forgetting is forgiving is forgetting.)

I think of a small white room and a man — likely my instructor — who was roughly half its size, bulging out of old polo shirts with arms like hairy meatloaves. There is a music stand in front of us, a small piano to the side. The fluorescent lights are very bright. Is that a guitar resting on my leg? No.

I’m holding something in both hands, there is a taste of old bamboo in my mouth. I think it’s that godforsaken clarinet.

Also, he might have been very, very thin.

For reasons that may be obvious but which I don’t really care to get into, I’ve been on a lot of Flagyl and Diflucan lately. Flagyl is an unfortunate prescription, packaged in pills roughly the size of footballs: the standard dosage is one of these things twice a day, for a week. They aren’t kind on the stomach, but then, I’ve yet to meet an antibiotic that is.

“Huh!” the fourth nurse I’d seen regarding this problem said, staring perplexedly. “So you’ve had this for nearly three months now, eh?” In a sudden, alarming motion, my insides were no longer pried open and facing the door. (Massachusetts doctors are terrible about this.) “Tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to write you another prescription for Flagyl.”

What a fantastic idea, I thought.

“Only this time, both you and your partner will take it. And not for a week. One big dose. You’ll both take it at the same time.”

Like a suicide pact?

“You’ll want to take it with food. And right before bed, so you don’t notice the nausea. Is your partner allergic to anything?”

She scribbled out a prescription with one refill good for my partner — a shady medical move if ever I’d seen one, although the folks at the pharmacy had absolutely no issue with it — and sent me on my merry way. I filled the prescription that day, and the next, Jurvis went to pick up his refill. The other night we sat down together on the couch and horked the bastards down.

The plan: depart Boston at eleven thirty pm, pick up Jesse from bus terminal — squeezing five (tall) people into a two-door car. Drive to the cabin in the Cape (technically owned by confused schizophrenic, absent), brunch (french toast), walk (some jetty), Provincetoooooooown (fake mustaches, pornography).

Four o’clock: board fast ferry back to Boston.

Old friends, jetty.

Cookbook in the cabin. Full of good ideas.

See more of our fourteen-hour adventure here.