Tar
It’s as if the cigarette became part of who I am. They started going fast, my cigarettes. I light a new one, pull a few breaths into me, and it’s gone. Then the next, and that one’s gone too. I don’t remember deciding to light any of them. My hand does it while I am thinking about something else, and by the time I notice, there is already smoke in me.
I feel the whole tar of every cigarette I’ve ever smoked on the tip of my tongue, in my sinuses, in the dark depths of my throat. It has a weight now. It sits low, the way water sits in a cloth. So much so that no mint, no toothpaste can pull the tobacco tar out of my body anymore, this thing that is now a part of me. I have tried. I hold the mint on my tongue until it burns and dissolves, and underneath it the old taste is still there, patient, waiting for the sweetness to give up. The only thing I do is spit, now and then. It comes up darker than it should.
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The tar, the resin, has gotten so bad that when I look in the mirror my tongue is sometimes pitch black, sometimes purple. I have started to study it the way you’d study a stain spreading on a ceiling, knowing there is water moving somewhere above you that you cannot reach. And I hate myself. As if I want to take a knife and cut my tongue out, scrape my throat raw, be rid of this tar. I dig at the inside of my throat with my nails. Sometimes a little blood comes, and for a second I am almost glad, because blood is at least the right color, blood is mine. Then it stops, and the tar stays where it is. The tar doesn’t clean off.
Out of spite I light another one on top of it. There’s nothing for me to do but to surrender. Now I swallow the butts along with it, the filter, the last warm inch, all of it, and I feel them go down and join the rest, and somewhere below I understand that I am filling slowly with the thing I am trying to get out. I want to kill my physical self, nothing else. The thought is not loud. It arrives the way the next cigarette arrives, already lit, already half gone.
I want to lie down the length of the pavement and turn into a piece of tar. Pitch black, slack, soft, sticky. To stop being a man who has tar in him and simply be the tar, evenly, all the way through, with nothing clean left inside to keep scraping for. Stretched out full length on the sidewalk, gone soft in the heat, and from a hollow where the mouth used to be, thin cigarette smoke still rising, as if somewhere in there one last one is still going.
This piece was originally written in Turkish between 2004 and 2009. The English version was rendered with Claude (Anthropic), working from the original text to preserve its tone and rhythm rather than to translate it literally.
