M My beloved cigarette, now I stand here with you and ask myself: Why?! Why have I ended up with you again, even though you are so toxic? I inhale your smoke, it burns in my mouth. Yes, you don’t even taste good, but you make me happy. You are my refuge in difficult times and my reward after a stressful day. I like having you with me when I drink coffee or go out. You lift me up when I’m down, and bring me down when my emotions run high. I’ve known you since I was 15. It was summer, we sat by the lake, someone offered me a drag, I tried: Yuck! The sweet A. was furious, I was furious that he was furious, and so I pulled again and again and again.
What have we not experienced together: moves, breakups, all-night parties at the shared flat kitchen table. Actually I have known you even longer. My father was your biggest fan, at times he smoked three packs of you, in the study we called the command center, or in the car on the way to hockey with the windows rolled down so we kids didn’t get so much of it. As a child I wanted to destroy you, I even tried to break you apart, but eventually you slipped into my life and I willingly let you in. Because I wanted to be reckless, that belongs to it. More skater girl than horse girl, more French film star than Marienhof.
Someone once said: We Millennials are a scientific experiment. Starting in adolescence, many of us have been drinking and smoking at least into our late twenties, early thirties. Overall, most of us later got our act together, only some addiction remains. I have already been to a pulmonologist because of you. He told me that if I keep hanging out with you, I will live ten years shorter.
Oh no! On every cigarette pack you can see what you do to our organs. And yes, it scares me. Is there perhaps a lump? Damn, I can feel something there. If this “Smoke-Free Bestseller” weren’t written so damn poorly, I would have kicked you out of my life long ago. And three, four, five, yes maybe even ten times I have managed to do it as well. Only then comes again the moment when I am weak. Oh, today I’ll make an exception, I think. Or at every next catastrophe: It doesn’t matter now anyway.
At least I smoke nowadays only very little. But still: where does this urge come from to slowly poison myself? Is it an aggression against myself? Or the realization that something will kill me eventually anyway, and in the meantime I can also go a little wild? Because as a smoker, smoking is fun for me.
A colleague once said that you could make a mixed calculation. Smoking a bit perhaps is in the long run actually better than banning it completely and thus constantly being stressed and in a bad mood, says the addiction in me – or is it me? On the other hand, it is somehow bitter to have fallen for the evil tobacco companies. A cute winery in a romantic hillside location would be more stylish. So, I am quitting. This time for real. Never contact me again! If there’s anything left to clarify, I know where to find you.
