Smoker’s Dissonance

Cigarettes are like flares. I light them hoping someone else will be drawn to my light. But flares burn red and quick, signaling distress. People swerve to give a wide berth to flares while I fill with longing for intimacy because that’s what my addiction to “social smoking” was built upon—a desire for something meaningful, no matter how fleeting and no matter the cost. 

But in a ruminating mind, I am not given the gift of simply smoking and yearning, because Shame is standing nearby to take the wind out of my sails harder than any American Spirit ever could. How is that self-loathing worth it? That’s the nature of addiction—cognitive dissonance doesn’t cancel out craving, the mental simulacrum of need. 

On this particular evening, I light a cigarette on the small stoop of my apartment. The breeze blows the smoke back into my house, so I decide to put on some slippers and walk along my block. I suddenly recall a billboard I saw recently admonishing big tobacco. It’s two images of the same little boy side by side. One image of him is clear and bright and says, “We see a dreamer,” the other is more blurry through a yellowed filter and says, “Tobacco companies see a customer,” or something along those lines. I get the message is targeted toward children’s futures, but I’m still affected by the suggestion that dreamers and smokers are mutually exclusive. 

When I walk back into my house and smell the stale smoke on myself something curdles inside of me. It’s the loneliness. What if you lit a flare, but help never came? You just watched it burn out as things got dark again.

It’s not that cigarettes make me feel hopeful, but that they feel like rolling the dice, a moment where I’m taking a little off the end, just to see if it’s possible to have a meaningful now. Some people claim they don’t understand vice, as if they’ve lived a life of purity and self-discipline. No one’s perfect. But when I smoke a cigarette my imperfection coils around me like a boa constrictor and no one comes to light my fire.

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