Cigarettes

What do you think of smoking cigarettes ? 

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Dear Maria,

I quit smoking two years ago.

It wasn’t pretty.

I locked myself away in a house on top of an Italian mountain for two weeks—

nowhere near a trace of a tobacco shop.

The withdrawal symptoms were intense,

but I made it.

And secretly… I still love it.

There are mornings when I watch my girlfriend rise,

coffee in one hand, cigarette in the other—

and I feel the flicker of quiet envy.

I love fire.

The slow dance of rolling fingers.

I miss lighting a cigarette—

an excuse to stop time for a moment.

Especially when you're young and beautiful:

that essential melancholy,

that irresistible youth that dares death to come closer.

I love the ritual.

The artistic shame.

The cinematic loneliness.

And that strange, self-aware logic smokers use to keep smoking—

like: "Quitting’s easy. I’ve done it a thousand times."

There’s something sublimely destructive about it.

 Magically absurd.

 And brutally honest:

Smoking destroys you.

It’s nothing but a long, anonymous suicide.

A slow train rushing through your body—

like a snail crawling across the edge of a razor blade.

No matter how poetic it seems,

No matter how heartbreakingly beautiful the aesthetics of the old Tigra cigarette pack once were——

it steals  your life.

You're just a puppet caught in the spell of addiction.

A trap. Slow, but certain.

A Fall. 

Most likely a fall ending in a coma-like existence in a green hospital room.

It is a vaguely fascinating place between self-castration and suicide.

An intimate rebellion against life -

and therefore so devastatingly irresistible.

But nothing, nothing

is more radical than staying.

Nothing more pure than full existence.

So if I have to choose -

between slowly disappearing and inexorably living,

between the soft, seductive voice of deadly smoke

and the cry of being, like that of a newborn child -

then I choose existence.

For the raw, reckless splendor of pure life itself.

With love,

Coma