One Last Cigarette

One Last Cigarette

While walking through the village on my way to meet some friends for dinner, I came across a dilapidated three-story gutted shell, 

With boarded up windows, graffiti covered walls and the 200-year-old limestone rotting in yellow.

This shell was once the Repertory Theater I performed in.  the first chapter of my adult life.

That very stoop was where we drank coffee and hot chocolate on cold Saturday mornings waiting for rehearsal, and smoked cigarettes during our breaks and after performances.  

I saw a young guy probably not much older than I was when this shanty was a playhouse standing near me vaping and scrolling through his phone.  

He asked if the smoke was bothering me,  I said not at all, than I asked if he knew about this place?

He worked for the hotel next-door and said he actually knows about the building, because the owners of this hotel have purchased the abandoned theater and plan to turn it in to a guest house.  

Knowing it was going to undergo a massive renovation, I sat on the stoop or the old, abandoned theater one last time to smoking a cigarette,

In a cloud of smoke rising above me are ghosts of my millennium life. 

A time of innocence once longed for, but a period of lots of firsts, experiences and some never agains.  I made friends who’ve become lifelong sisters with up to today, friends who faded as we went our separate ways; but sure, would love to see again, certain friends who I wonder now “What was I thinking”, quite a handful we follow each other on social. Those formative years there were massive crushes, fleeting lovers, corky jobs I wound up hating, plays in piano stores and comedy clubs,

I crashed in the dressing room after late nights of watching plays and going to 24 Hour diners, The futon I slept one was hard, the air was musty and possibly haunted.  But I felt safe in that limestone building because above the theater lived some friends in closets and crawl spaces turned SROs, anything to live in the village for 200 bucks a month back in 1999.  

Those late-night downtown scenes evaporating with the smoke.

I stub out the last of my cigarette, toss the butt into the street, and press onward.

Past fusion bistros once 10 Dollar Stores we browsed in.

And turned the corner passing by spas and galleries that were once bohemian coffee houses, where the wiry cushions nearly poked our asses… but we were young and not yet domesticated enough to care.  

I walk by these places in the warm June evening, 

Familiar ghosts all around,