Cigarettes

When I started smoking, I started for one simple reason: I wanted to die



For me, my inevitable death was the only comfort I had in life. And with every cigarette I felt one step closer to death. That was a good thing to me. That was the only freedom and peace I could ever look forward to in life of constant fear and misery.

As the years passed by, I always felt I would quit one day, if I lived that long. The age I always focused on as my quitting year was 35. If I was still alive by 35, I would quit because it was taking too long. If they don't kill me by then, they're only making life worse. So that is when I always promised myself I would quit.

Lately I've been thinking about this. I love to sing and I think about how much better I would be if I stopped. I think about how much faster, stronger, and better I would feel if I quit and I start thinking that I might actually do that earlier than planned. It is logical after all. I would feel healthier and better if I quit. I dwell on this more and more. And how stupid it is to smoke. I get almost to the point of deciding to give it up right away when that old question floats back into my thoughts: Do I still want to die?



It's a hard question. I don't really know if I can answer that yet. As incredibly better as life has become, I still feel old pains ringing out from my past. I still have issues and problems that drive me to loneliness and despair. I still can't tell whether I'm actually happy, or that I'm just that good at faking it. In short, I don't know whether I want to die or not. I've been alive too long to feel such comfort from drastic change. I've grown accustomed to this shit life. There are even rare moments where I even fear death.


Now that scares me. The thing that brought me so much comfort now scares me sometimes. What do I have left to look forward to now? Being scared of death makes me not want to live anymore, but not living anymore scares me, so I want to live, but I hate life, so I want to die, but I'm afraid of dying so I want to live, but I'm afraid of living so I want to die...  It's an ouroboros effect.


I hate this ambivalence. It pervades every aspect of my outer and inner life. It chases me in dreams and haunts my every waking moment. I feel as if I've lost all substance. Like I've become amorphous, hollow, invisible. I do not have an opinion one way or the other. I'm constantly torn by indecisiveness. I am simply existing. And at that, just barely. I have no goals. No ambitions. No motivation. All has become gray. Happiness is just a thing. No better or worse than sadness. Hardly even different at all. One flavor is as good as the next. Whether I disappoint or overachieve, I feel no different. I feel nothing, always. I see things and I understand them, but nothing truly moves me. It's all just there. I respond with how I feel I should respond, but without the actual feeling.


Do I still want to die? I don't know.
I'm looking for something, anything to breathe new life into me, but it is hard when you don't really care.

I drift.
I drift away.
I drift away from you.
And it goes unnoticed.
Without a whisper.
No sound at all.