Filter-Tips and Bruised Ribs
If people reach for cigarettes knowing it’ll ruin their lungs, then why is it foolish to yearn for love knowing it’ll ruin your heart?
We are creatures born of an ancient and quiet desperation, constantly bargaining with the things that destroy us since those are the only things that proves we are still alive; we take poison and regard it as a habit, yet pour ourselves into another person and label that a tragic mistake.
Lighting a cigarette means having a quiet, poetic conversation with death. Each time you strike a match, you are entering into an agreement. You are familiar with the subtle art of the slow burn, the way the smoke stains everything it comes into contact with, reduces your lifespan, and makes promises of comfort from within a cardboard box bearing a graphic warning. Yet you still reach for the lighter, because a conscious, chosen wound is infinitely more bearable than the terrifying void of numbness. The smoke gives our sorrow a physical presence; we can see it, hold it, and watch it disappear, thinking that the dissipating of the ash means the pain has disappeared.
Why, then, do we feel so trembling when the heart asks to be destroyed if we are ready to give our lungs to the fire?
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Love is an extremely frightening form of alchemy, rooted in the same kind of daring. It starts with the excitement of making the attempt — the electric anticipation of tasting something, the sudden and terrifying warmth of another person’s skin coming into contact with yours, and the mutual temptation to burn. A kiss dries out your throat just as much as a drag from a cigarette does. Both require all your breath and each provides a kind of sanctuary which by its very nature cannot last. One leaves soot in your lungs; the other leaves bruises on your ribs. You will choke on the ash of a memory just as certainly as you will cough up a lungful of stray smoke.
Neither tongue ever truly forgets. They both go in sweet and slippery, thanks to the illusion of relief, and both end up with a harsh, metallic bitterness when the ember at last fades away. We long for the ruin since the alternative — a sterile and untouched preservation — is a kind of living death.
We draw an artificial distinction between the two, referring to one as a dirty addiction and the other as a foolish mistake, but in fact they are twin fires started by the same hand — that is, yours, the one who has decided to take the risk. Both represent a gradual surrender. Both involve that poetic and dangerous desire to die on the lips of something which makes you feel alive right before it destroys you.
If you are destined to fade into smoke anyway, what difference does it make which organ you offer up to the flame? Why feed your lungs to a chemical that was never built for devotion, when you could let your heart burn for something that actually knew your name? If the cost of feeling warm is destruction, then let that cost be love. At least when the heart breaks, it breaks because it had the courage to hold something true, it breaks for having dared to hold something real, if only for a moment, before it all turns to ash.
If both will inevitably consume you, which fire would you rather let yourself burn in?
(You ask yourself, as you light a cigarette.)
-era.
