I do not look up enough...

A couple of years back, I was walking with an old friend from our university campus, cigarettes in hand, talking about all the liberal thoughts that flow through the young mind. It was some time in the evening, just between the setting sun and emerging dark—the perfect scenario for pointlessly meaningful thought.

Plagued by our generation, we would be drawn to check our phones every so often just in case something ‘important’ was there to please us. Of course, just like the time before, nothing. As we walked further, cigarette descending like the sun ahead of us, I began getting more and more frustrated at the break in conversation that our devices brought. Without a second thought, I discarded my phone to the furthest part of my backpack. My hand felt empty, so I rolled myself another cigarette. If there was something to replace one addiction, it is the other.

We sat at a nearby wall and planned our day. While other students decided to drown themselves in debt or drink away their money, we chose to sit and stare. A soft quiet began to settle as we inhaled the cigarette-smoked outdoors. I do not know what possessed me at the moment, but my arched back clicked slowly, upwards, going against all the strain caused by the years of device negligence I have done to my body. My spine stretched to areas I forgot were even possible. Each click, filled with pain and relief, set me towards the skies. I exhaled the smoke and relaxed in place—what a sight.

My companion asked me what I was doing, clearly shocked I would even think of undergoing such an unusual manoeuvre. I rolled my broken neck towards him and expelled words like ash towards an ashtray.

“I do not look up enough.”

The words took him by surprise as, just like cranking up an old jack in a box, he began to see what it was that caught my attention. The cogs were clearly rusty, but just like me, the release gave in and there we were, two students finally looking up at the stars, like our ancestors before us.

No words were coming from both of us. A gaze so beautiful that we wished to pause it, like a movie you never want to end. Yet this was better. The stars began to fade in alongside a crescent banana-like figure rotating through the sky. We recall seeing something like this in Star Wars but did not believe it could be possible. Yet, there it was. Honest and beautiful, or was all of this the hologram that we’ve always wished for? Was anything real? The thoughts settled further as we fell deeper and deeper, cigarette after cigarette, time fleeing like melting butter.

Questions came flooding to us like a Black Friday stampede. We bounced words off of each other like ping pong. Creating simile’s that best described the feelings we felt, yet no words could match the sensation. We smiled like the stupid; we laughed like the drunk. At that moment, nothing really mattered. Nothing mattered before, but then we had goals. Goals to keep busy and goals to please both ourselves and others. Nothing that would matter in the greater scope of things. What mattered was how great we felt right there and how many cigarettes we have smoked by this point. It was the only thing that would get us to move from our wall. This was our wall, and the sky felt empty with us in the middle. A phenomenal feeling, yet I am scared I cannot replicate it if I stop looking.

Hours passed, and our smokes have run away, leaving us taking in the clean poison. We released our necks like pistons in the wind, swinging from side to side wider than our smiles. We stood up, looked at each other and began walking to the closes corner shop in pursue of nicotine. We walked a little before my hand started the familiar twitch it did beforehand. Logic states if one addiction is not here, you must engulf the other. I swam through the swamp of notebooks and headphone wires. I felt pretty proud of how far I managed to discard my phone as I struggled to get to it. Nothing was getting in or out, nobody, no sound.

After halting our journey to support the mission on the ground, I managed to fish out the phone. I looked at the screen and, to my surprise, a message waiting for me. Dopamine smacked me in the face as a light grin came over me while opening the text message. I was vulnerable and happy, easy prey. It read me the knockout uppercut.

“Call me quick! There’s been a huge accident!”