Smoke Break

I leave for Minneapolis in the morning. I’m tired of airplanes - tired of traversing the planet in the sky. In my best of all possible worlds, perhaps, I’d roll on my belly in the dirt – slither across the continent and feel not merely see the distance as it neared, I wallow in it and then crawl away.

I want a cigarette – such a little flush of plant, soaked in lethal chemicals and wrapped up in a bit a scrap paper can have the most seductive allure. I imagine myself sitting on a hillside with a perfect cup of coffee, dog by my side, and in the strike of a flint a year of resistance down the drain. But can’t you just smell the sickly sweet and stale smell of burning tobacco wrecking the crisp spring air? And the coffee - steamy and sticky and sweet? Sigh. It’s pretty to think so. And just as quickly I’m forced to flush those thoughts from my mind and stay the course.

Amidst Ed’s laundry I found a mostly empty pack, with a sole lonely cigarette inside. I wasn’t looking, mind you. I was sorting laundry – that’s all. And I pulled the pack out of the inside shirt pocket, took out the cigarette and rolled it between my fingers, held it in my hand and smelled it. I walked into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror while I mock smoked it… just for a second before tossing it in the toilet and flushing it along with those thoughts.

Over a year since I set aside that seductress and still the sirens sometimes woo me with melodious enchantments - (empty) promises of a lush life. But when she turns round toward me in the pale light of morning, she’s old, weathered and wrinkled – not with those beautiful lines of character and a life well lived, but more like a hunger folding in on itself over and over again – (can you imagine all that greed and avarice coming down on that child’s lips?) If it wasn’t such a lie or at least if I could believe it…