Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

May 31st, 2025, Saturday.

I have ten minutes to smoke the last cigarette of my life. For the thousandth time I promised my mother, but moreover, I have pondered quitting for some while. I pour the tobacco into chocolate-brown liquorice paper, place in a filter tip, swirl, roll, lick from corner to corner, and conclude another masterpiece, rolled and smoked a thousand times over. If only that were true — as twenty years of smoking sums up to tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of cigarettes. When I gazed up some minutes ago, the digital clock’s imagined hour hands had struck precisely 23:50:00 — must have been fate, because my whole purpose in glancing mid-roll was to observe time’s alignment with my will. To make yet another of my countless attempts, or lies to myself, and quit upon a certain hour, on a certain day favoured by my obsessive-compulsive mind whose ways have burdened my entire life.

The hour is now 23:57:33 — I down my coffee, wash my cup as the fan above sucks in smoke released from my black lungs, and remember how times have changed. It’s no longer cool to smoke. No, vaping now circulates the trend. Forget smoking — what is this, the fifties? Now is the age of flavoured juices:

“Ladies and gentlemen, brothers, sisters, loudmouth lasses, miserable misters!
Come, come; assemble around this round table where flavours abound
Enable you to take your pick. So, make sound
And slick judgement on this new device called vape.”

I look upon the clock, 23:59:07 — the roll-up is already finished; its final drags inhaled without much awareness while I was writing this. Dear God, may this, which I now, both symbolically and metaphorically, flush down the loo, forever remain: my final cigarette.

* * *

June 1st, 2025, Sunday.

And not even half an hour passes this new day, and here I am — already rolling again, ready to puff away another cigarette.

The fucking irony — smoke gets in your eyes.