I’m not sure when I had my first cigarette, but I was in single digits. I remember the moment itself quite clearly though. It was in a run down old shed near my back garden. You had to climb three walls and shimmy through an open window if I remember right. The family of the person that had once owned the shed and probably passed on had left a lot of things in it – furniture, tools, bottle collections and electrics; the sort of cobwebbed shed so stuffed with a hodgepodge everything that it made a marvellous secret place for kids or to begin a novel with.

But this isn’t a book… Fuck Them Fuck That… don’t they know a lot of people have to Die.

I had a fascination with cigarettes from a young age. I remember being very small, my father cutting the lawn and throwing a cigarette away. Still lit, I took it as some sort of treasure. I moved it about a little, and I can still mentally feel the sort of reverence I treated it with.

Lying there, red hot, glowing the whisper – “Let me love you…” “I know you’ll love Me…”

It was probably a foregone conclusion I was going to be a smoker. I was born into a world of smokers. I loved the smell, I loved the taste, I loved everything about it and everything that smoked was cool.

Sometimes, my hands get hot and they claw up – sometimes they feel so pent up, they could split themselves in a drive to force their fingers through my wrists.

From the last generation with the loose laws; right before the belt tightening, moralising and finger wagging – I was lucky. You could still say a pack of cigarettes were for your mother and get them, whatever the age.

Old photos still speak of our relationship. A past I can’t disassociate. I have to relearn how to do everything alone.

A glorious time before Marlboro had become cowboy killers and lawsuits were the sharks on the horizon. Back when cigarettes had just started to become properly bad for you. Yet still cool, still dangerous, still everything you wanted to be if you had half the idiot my intelligence had.

I don’t want to feed it. I can feel it hum like the OM of a planet every time I pay it even half the compliment the warmth of a misty eyed reminiscence has.

I can still remember getting my hands on fireworks and cheroots one Halloween. One is illegal in my country, the other I was underage for. I managed a whole two weeks where I did not blow my face off and in my mind, was the shit. Other kids around me, fumbling, skritching their lighters to get a banger to light. I just had to hold the fuse to the cheroot in my mouth and throw.

The hand paws against the glass of my chest and my jaw clenches so hard my molars whine worryingly.

The rest is just a steady stamp for the final acceptance by parents; you smoke, and then time just becomes a march of cigarettes. Pink lunged, free and easy you can smoke like a God and maybe you will. Third maybe fourth generation, you are smoking distilled. The very vibration of your presence makes others around you take it up, smoke more and or both.

And sometimes, it’s a partner, just the right side of high and a cocktail to be extra fluid. Miming to Erma Franklin or Florence, they run three fingers down your face and beckon you forward.

I’m reminded of the teenage friend who needed more in common with me. She started smoking Sweet Afton filter-less. Do not pass go, do not pick up two hundred filtered, go straight to hardcore. I was quite mad with her. It was a sudden and complete affectation, as are many smokers. But more so, she was an awkward smoker. It didn’t settle with her body movements and she always looked like she was talking to someone who made her physically uncomfortable. She was not meant to smoke. Her body told that tale and I found that unbearably irritating. I all but confiscated the cigarettes from her by power chain-smoking them one after another as we sat.

Prophet like I rise from sleep, ribs, chest first, in a gasped swelling hymn toward Gods. In the cold sweat look around. I can hear her laughter.

I smoked those cigarettes on her like a twisted reversal of fortune. The child caught by their parents, forced to smoke one or two or the whole pack to make them sick – the psychological marker. These are bad. They make you sick. No. I eat them up. I eat up your sicknesses. And I savour them. It wasn’t an unfit lifestyle. I played sports, I went to the gym everyday. Maybe it grew unfit later. Maybe – maybe there’s lots of maybes. Injury is a grand excuse to sit back and smoke the pain away. Everything is a grand excuse to smoke the day away. They were beautiful things of flavor and vim! They kept you focused!

Isn’t it great! With them! You’re never alone! Do you want to be alone – do you want to always, always, be, alone? It’s quite simple, a short holiday is understandable, but you don’t have to be alone.

It is a truth about smoking. A horrible truth. One, I – a hood eyed, toe suckling maggot at the feet of a false goddess. Both despised for it’s reality and loved at the same time. You are never alone with cigarettes. That brown bottomed, white bodied red haired lil’ fellow in your hand. Why, it’s instant – there, a pan-dimensional anchor-crutch that means you really are never, never alone.

Oh you can run out of cigarettes. But there is something about that, that means you are still never alone. A friend – flash, fast or otherwise – can always give you a temporary stopgap. You can always buy more – don’t worry, it doesn’t feel odd. There is a constant in form and taste that means it’s still your same old friend. Frankenstein; you can craft replacement companions out of the corpses of your previous friends. You are never alone.

When I close my eyes; I can feel it creeping back. Pushing and crawling through doors and hallways, vaguely like the thing in the bathtub. Rotting, dripping phlegmatic matter. I can feel it grasp the air between us.

That is why smokers are so damn chatty. They have this pan-dimensional anchor, that offers not self confidence, but just a blanket of reassurance. It doesn’t matter if they’re rude; if they don’t want to talk back. I still have you, and sweet dripping Mary do you taste good, c’mere quick let me put you back into my mouth. It’s safe, you’re safe, you have the smoke. It’s why it’s just so easy to strike conversation up in a smoking area or outside an airport. You’re all safe, it’s okay, she’s got you.

Often, when I dream, I think she is there on the pillow beside me. Leaning on her elbow, whispering secrets and promise. She only has eyes, lips for me and the words roll charcoal filtered succulence and I’m almost lost to their covenant. Before I snap awake; sodden, breathless, wheezing.

Accurate daily numbers, I couldn’t give you. A cross genre smoker; if it was a way of ingesting Tobacco, I was doing it. Possibly at once. Running a pipe and a cigarette, pausing during a cigar to smoke a pipe or cigarette. A sort of Tobacco-centric Flaubert, except my prostitutes are easier to kill.

When she moved out – when we agreed she’d leave – I let her take whatever she wanted. It seemed easier than fighting. After all, they were – are – only things. Better shot of her than the constant bickering over who owns what.

Now I find myself with nothing.

Nothing but water.

Coffee, writing, film, alcohol, fucking, everything…

She phones occasionally to remind me of a particular moment. Coffee and whisky on a rain damp, autumnal Amsterdam square. An intensely shared post coital rollup of Javanese tobacco shared on a boulder in the middle of a mountain stream. I think she thinks I may change my mind…

I’ve quit before. In fact, I have failed at giving up several times. Usually it is the stress and outside circumstance that somehow weasels them back in. Just one here, two there. Sure the sheer self loathing I feel for even taking one drag is enough to eclipse the stress I’m feeling. An interesting crux, considering how many people seem to think you smoke to ease the feelings of stress. When, as a quitter, often you smoke to blot out the stress with even larger feelings of self negativity.

A horrible chain of events; like hiding that theft with that assault and that assault with that rape and that rape with that murder. Until you’re smoking again and your chest hurts and you don’t remember why the bathtub is full of blood and ladies clothes. I’m pretty sure if I just carry on down this highway of wrongs, eventually they will be an exit for rights. For crying out loud, right has to be a town between this and the next city.

You meet at parties. Try to ignore her. Try not to notice who she’s with. How they hold her. Try not to show how it interests you. Offer waved hands and empty words that you don’t mind, don’t worry, forget about it.

Stuck between people, a random dickhead blows smoke in my face and tries to shove a cigarette between my lips while repeating the mantra “Go on have one. Go on have one.” He’s lucky the bouncer both knows me and is sympathetic to my attempt.

What they don’t realise. What they fail to know. Is often, just how close I am to murdering them all. Fuck you. My body undulates like some sort of psychopathic Rainman having a bad moment. Except the only numbers here are the mathematics of how to kill them all. Fuck all of you. My fingers click, whirr, fidget and spin. The twitch has been there awhile. Excuse me, I have to go outside, stand in the cold a moment.

There. Right there, is something I don’t understand. I say I’ve quit smoking and someone offers me a cigarette. Or blows smoke in my face, or tries to put an unlit one in my hand or mouth. Sometimes they spend a whole cigarette blowing the smoke into my face. This is not paranoia. I watch them. I don’t understand them. But they do it. They do it and they smile. I ignore the ones who will talk at length to me, telling me how I will break and fail. Easy to tune out. But it’s the ones who actively do things like put lit cigarettes in my mouth or hand.

Who are they?

Why do we let them live?

A shadow or something spiderwalks up a wall in the corner of my vision.

Jeering, gurning social spastics. They are the lowest of us. The base wormtongues of lower awareness that see someone trying to change and claw them back down. Maybe because they don’t want them to change. Maybe because – like some sort of laughing simpleton they think in some way it’s funny or that pathetic empty “cool-evil”.

Deep in the asylum; chawed fingers grip the bars and rattle them with the strength of madness as it screams and screams.

It’s not like the writing hasn’t been on the wall for awhile. The poor circulation. The pleurisy. The blood in your spit and the morning voice that sounds like a wound. Yes, it’s time the circus left town and this is the last chance to see…

It’s been two months, but sometimes, just sometimes, I turn while working and I can smell her, lingering there, in an empty room she hasn’t been a part of in a long time. Tricks, it’s just tricks.

You resolve no more after this pack. Promise that once all the tobacco in the house is gone you’ll stop. That’s it now, maybe except for the odd cigar. I have so many left, and sure, it’s not like they’re really smoking. The artful dodge, you’ll lie back and around yourself knowing you even inhale cigars.

The skin on my chest itches. Smaller blisters begin to form into one ever-growing blister that aches and burns. Sometimes, when I’m still, I can feel something move beneath the taut flesh of the blister.

When the aura never leaves and no matter how clean your clothes are, they still come. The shambling zombie horde, paws out-stretched, mealy mouths twisting the same request: “Got a spare smoke?” When even your own mother tells you she always thought smoking suited you. You find days taken up with wide-eyed wandering anything to distract the hunger.

The endless lung gnawing hunger.

The rattling continues deep in the basement. Her smell is all around the apartment and you always wake to the echo of her voice. The blister bursts and the guinea worm of your addiction pushes free from the wet, mossy, black-brown flesh of your lungs. To twist about and regard you.

The hopeless words are there, in the push flail against the hunger.

I think we’re going to need a bigger match.

---

I never reached the time where it goes from being taken each day by day. I never left the lung hungry time of taking it moment by hand clenched moment.

I began this to show myself I could write without smoking. The funny thing is, I resumed smoking halfway through writing this piece. It remained on a shelf for months because I could not write the hunger while smoking. There was just no way to method act it out through writing. As if the nicotine knew and would flatline my thoughts until I gave up, unable to discuss the addiction. Tobacco’s battered wife, or the former Nicotine field agent, sitting there, wide-eyed with tales to tell you but knowing the voice inside will never let those words out.

Love me, you’ll always love me, you’ll never leave me…

To finally resume the writing of this, I had to refrain from smoking. Yet to bait the hunger, surround myself with tobacco. At this point, I have not smoked in twenty-four hours, just to edit and write this piece properly. This would be the good start. I’d like to tell you, it’s the springboard I will use to try again. But I’m not going to lie. Just the thought of that eagerly anticipated smoke has been enough to make sure this was finished. I look forward to running back into her arms.

Love me, I know you’ll love me

Maybe tomorrow.

You are mine after all. Mine…