BdJ

This man - forties or fifties - smoked like a character in a film noir. Elegantly. Beautifully. His hands held the cigarette just so. It was delicate yet masculine. Instead of blowing out a guilty jet of smoke to the side, he exhaled a beautiful silver plume around him. He was confident in his smoking, he liked his smoking, and he was unapologetic. He did not finish with the nervous tap-tap-squish of the teenage closet puffer who continued the habit into adulthood or the pitch-and-ignore of the furtive doorway smoker. He did it with a final and decisive chess move of extinguishment. It even bordered on sexy.