Coffin nails.
Jun. 3rd, 2005 04:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
icebluenothing"I wanted to breathe smoke.
Birds and deer are a silly luxury, and all the fish should be floating.
I wanted to burn the Louvre. I'd do the Elgin Marbles with a sledgehammer and wipe my ass with the Mona Lisa. This is my world, now.
This is my world, my world, and those ancient people are dead."
I have here, next to these keys, the silver cigarette case my father gave me, some months or years ago. It's really very pretty. An odd size, by my modern standards; I've never found cigarettes that will fit it. It has a map embossed on it of the British Isles, where he and my mother met during The War, where his lifeline and hers had crossed and merged, half a world away.
My father had given it to me a little apologetically -- he thought I might like to have it simply because it was his, even though, as he said, I wouldn't have a use for it. I lied and agreed that I wouldn't. I wouldn't want him to know I smoke myself, on occasion. He wouldn't approve.
It's foolish of me, I know it is. I do it in moderation. Once a month, if that. It makes me a rarity in a world where everyone around me smokes constantly or not at all, as if the world were divided into alcoholics or teetotalers.
It was something I tried for the first time when I was -- eighteen? Nineteen? On the theory that I would try it once, wouldn't like it (no one does their first time, right?), and would never be curious again. Practice differed from theory. I didn't mind it at all. Years later, when the Goth scene led me to clove cigarettes, I found I liked them quite a bit.
I still have nightmare-like images burned into my head -- my Uncle Jack, my mother's brother, in his cancer bed in the hospital, not long before he died. Arms and legs like sticks, like a starving man, his torso bloated like a corpse pulled from the river. By all rights, I should never have started.
My father quit smoking. Before I was even born, if I recall correctly. He was in the hospital himself for some weeks -- I forget what for, but I think he may even have been in an oxygen tent for a while. At any rate, he hadn't been allowed to smoke, of course. When he was released from the hospital, he started to light up a cigarette, and then thought -- "What the hell am I doing?" He was past the cravings, past the need he'd built up. He was just giving into habit, and decided that was stupid -- here was his chance to quit, so he took it. That was decades ago, and he never started again. A very sensible thing to do.
We do sensible things, most of us. We try to eat right, get some exercise, get the right kind of sleep, do what our doctors tell us. Whistling in the dark, thinking the whole time that maybe, just this once, death won't come for us.
My father is a sensible man, and lung cancer came for him all the same.
The night he dies, I'm almost certainly going to be drinking. I'm going to have enough drinks to numb everything out to soft white noise. Enough drinks, and, almost certainly, some cigarettes.
Birds and deer are a silly luxury, and all the fish should be floating.
I wanted to burn the Louvre. I'd do the Elgin Marbles with a sledgehammer and wipe my ass with the Mona Lisa. This is my world, now.
This is my world, my world, and those ancient people are dead."
I have here, next to these keys, the silver cigarette case my father gave me, some months or years ago. It's really very pretty. An odd size, by my modern standards; I've never found cigarettes that will fit it. It has a map embossed on it of the British Isles, where he and my mother met during The War, where his lifeline and hers had crossed and merged, half a world away.
My father had given it to me a little apologetically -- he thought I might like to have it simply because it was his, even though, as he said, I wouldn't have a use for it. I lied and agreed that I wouldn't. I wouldn't want him to know I smoke myself, on occasion. He wouldn't approve.
It's foolish of me, I know it is. I do it in moderation. Once a month, if that. It makes me a rarity in a world where everyone around me smokes constantly or not at all, as if the world were divided into alcoholics or teetotalers.
It was something I tried for the first time when I was -- eighteen? Nineteen? On the theory that I would try it once, wouldn't like it (no one does their first time, right?), and would never be curious again. Practice differed from theory. I didn't mind it at all. Years later, when the Goth scene led me to clove cigarettes, I found I liked them quite a bit.
I still have nightmare-like images burned into my head -- my Uncle Jack, my mother's brother, in his cancer bed in the hospital, not long before he died. Arms and legs like sticks, like a starving man, his torso bloated like a corpse pulled from the river. By all rights, I should never have started.
My father quit smoking. Before I was even born, if I recall correctly. He was in the hospital himself for some weeks -- I forget what for, but I think he may even have been in an oxygen tent for a while. At any rate, he hadn't been allowed to smoke, of course. When he was released from the hospital, he started to light up a cigarette, and then thought -- "What the hell am I doing?" He was past the cravings, past the need he'd built up. He was just giving into habit, and decided that was stupid -- here was his chance to quit, so he took it. That was decades ago, and he never started again. A very sensible thing to do.
We do sensible things, most of us. We try to eat right, get some exercise, get the right kind of sleep, do what our doctors tell us. Whistling in the dark, thinking the whole time that maybe, just this once, death won't come for us.
My father is a sensible man, and lung cancer came for him all the same.
The night he dies, I'm almost certainly going to be drinking. I'm going to have enough drinks to numb everything out to soft white noise. Enough drinks, and, almost certainly, some cigarettes.
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no subject
Date: 2005-06-03 11:48 pm (UTC)All the same, I'm sorry.