I don’t smoke cigarettes. I never have. “Too unhealthy,” I always tell myself. “They yellow your teeth. Lung cancer. Gum cancer. Cheek cancer. I don’t want to die young.” Even still, every time I pass someone smoking a cigarette, I pause, breathe in a lungful of second-hand carcinogens, and let my mind wander for a minute.

I think about the man with the pipe my father and I would always pass when walking through the neighborhood I grew up in. I looked at his house on Google Maps the other day. The whole neighborhood is different now, of course. I think about how I still really like the smell of pipe tobacco.

I think about the time — I must have been five or six — when my parents registered me for day camp at a water park in Haifa, and I refused to go after the second day because my counselor chain-smoked. Ruchaleh ha’Meashenet, I called her; Ruchaleh the Smoker.

I think about the guy with the Andy Warhol banana tattooed on his chest and the afternoon we spent lying on South Beach in Miami talking about My Bloody Valentine. I remember feeling so grown up, even though I couldn’t have been more than 16. When I was going through my gmail account a few weeks ago, I reread the e-mail I sent telling him that we weren’t going to work. I never admitted it, but it was because I hated the taste of kissing him after he smoked. I contacted him on Facebook a few months ago and never got a response.

I think about my high school friends and the time they burnt off bits of my arm hair with a BIC lighter during lunch. Anndal, the one with the dreadlocks, and Tessa, her girlfriend. I never particularly liked the smell of clove cigarettes they all smoked. I remember sitting under the big tree near the bus loop at the old Atlantic High School campus, and the fight I had there with someone that, years before, I’d bitten. Actually bitten. Malcolm, sweet and “straight.” Meghan, and the chocolate muffin I spat out when I remembered that it was Passover and I shouldn’t be eating muffins.

I think about what I find aesthetically pleasing about smoking cigarettes, and about how I’d do it. I’d roll it myself and hold it, decisively, between the thumb and forefinger of my right hand. I wouldn’t feel strange walking through the park alone anymore. People who walk and smoke have a purpose — they’re smoking. People who just walk are clearly depressives with too much time on their hands.

I think about the first time I felt something for a boy from class at Swarthmore. I remember pretending to be bad at physics. He smoked, of course; big, unromantic American cigarettes, whatever brand was cheapest. Camel. Marlboro. Parliament.

I think about the time I put my arm around someone’s waist at a party, and then didn’t follow up on it. I tapped my feet to Nine Inch Nails in the basement of the Barn for hours, until I walked home, sober and annoyed with myself, some time around 3 in the morning. I remember the black snot the next day.

And then, even though only a few seconds have gone by, the smell is gone and I snap out of it and keep walking.