Leah stared longingly at the open pack being offered to her, filled with the familiar
but estranged corked tipped tubes she was once so used to. Marlboro Reds – her
old brand.
“I really shouldn’t…”, she said, snapping herself out of her trance.
“Oh come on, loosen up! We’re celebrating your promotion, and you won’t get me
in your garden again for a long time Leah.” Sarah punctuated her attempt at
persuasion with a quick and hard drag from her mostly-smoked cigarette. She
drew on the uncomfortably hot filter, snap inhaled a creamy white ball of smoke
into her chest, let it settle for a few seconds and exhaled the residue directly into
the space between her and Leah.
“Second hand smoke, first hand smoke, it’s all the same. Come on, I promise I
won’t tell anyone!”, Sarah laughed, sensing the goading was working by watching
Leah’s evolving facial expressions. She knew this woman well enough to know
when her resolve was crumbling.
Leah was too busy with her internal debate to think about Sarah’s motivations.
She’d been smoke free (or “clean”, as her militantly anti-smoking boyfriend put it)
for over a year now – a personal record, and an impressive one at that, given she
used to need over 30 of the cancer sticks a day to just be a functioning member of
society. It was only the ultimatum from her doctor that forced her to quit.
At 36 years old when she stopped, she’d managed to rationalise the damage that
her 20-year habit had done to her body. Out of breath after going up just a couple
flights of stairs? That’s the fault of her high heels – they make it difficult to walk. The
coughs throughout the day that had become ever-more frequent and ever-more
wet, hacking up phlegm in a worrying variety of grey-to-black colours? Well that’s
the allergies silly. What about the times where after just 10 minutes of sex with her
partner she’d roll over almost catatonic, her blood pressure so high she felt her
arteries were going to explode, her poor heart hammering away under her chest,
desperately trying it’s best to make her abused circulatory system work? Well,
that’s all because she was being passionate during the sex. And so on.
Smoke a cigarette, take a breath mint, spray some of her expensive top brand
perfume, re-adjust her perfect hair and designer clothes. Job done – out of sight,
out of mind. Her body was breaking down, in a serious way – it was just
imperceptible from the outside.
An observer might describe it as “ABTC” – that is, “anything but the cigarettes”.
After all, she attended her weekly yoga class, made sure to only eat organic foods,
always drank enough water to stay hydrated. Her cigarettes, fine, they were her
one vice, but she controlled them, not the other way around. A take it or leave it
relationship, a friendship that she could drop if needed. Or so she had persuaded
herself.
It was a short stint in hospital that finally made her give up. She’d gotten covid,
albeit mildly, early on in the pandemic, and the doctors were very clear – quit now
or increase the risk of permanent and serious lung scarring as the virus left her
system. Mostly through fear she’d did the thing she never thought she could do,
and gave up the cigarettes. The first few weeks was hellish but it was made
possible by the comparison of what would happen if she started again while still
being infected with covid. Not a good reason to base a long term quit on, one
might say.
Leah looked at the pack that Sarah had now been waving around in the air for the
last 60 seconds. Her manicured fingers reached out, for the first time in over a
year, and plucked one of the cigarettes from the open pack. Trembling, with both
guilt and excitement, she bought the cigarette to her mouth and placed it in the
well-worn grove in her lips. Taking the lighter offered by Sarah, she cupped the end
of the cigarette with her left hand…
She hesitated for a moment. She knew the consequences of lighting that cigarette.
But this was also her first real test after a year of coronavirus lockdown. Was she
really going to relapse at the first offer of a cigarette from a friend since her quit
date? The dangers of covid had passed since then, but still… was she really going
to go back down this path, undoing all the progress she’d made in the last year?
Her kids had stopped saying “Mommy sounds ill”, her in-laws had allowed her
back inside their house, her boyfriend had finally got off her back. But what had the
quit done for her? Misery and boredom, mostly.
“Fuck it”, she muttered. And then she clicked the lighter.
In an instant, the butane flame lit the end of the cigarette, and there was that oh-
so-familiar sensation of fresh smoke traveling down the length of the cigarette tube
to reach her awaiting mouth. She puckered her lips and drew hard, and she could
hear the cherry of the cigarette crackling. Smoke filled her mouth, instantly getting
back to work on re-establishing it’s dominance over her teeth, gums and tastebuds.
After a few seconds, her mouth was full, and she removed her cigarette from her
lips, too focused to notice the lipstick ring she had left on the filter. She opened her
mouth, let the burning hot smoke mix with the air for a fraction of a second, and
then snap inhaled the thick ball of smoke.
The smoke rushed down the back of her mouth, as the abrasive heat of the
burning ball of chemicals laid waste to all of the regenerative healing her throat
had undergone in the last year.
And then the smoke reached her lungs. Its old stomping ground. Leah’s lungs bore
the scars of her twenty year addiction, but they had improved remarkably over the
last year. The smoke made quick work of the first line of defence – the cilia, the tiny
hairs that are meant to stop foreign particles from entering. They were razed into
non-existence, and coated with a thick blanket of hot tar to ensure continued
paralysis.
And then that first inhale of that first cigarette in a whole year of non-smoking
finally reached its destination.
The smoke particles, now having split up into hundreds of thousands of smaller
groups, found their way to the alveoli. The lung’s ultra-delicate oxygen exchange
system. The smoke boldered in, tearing away at the lung tissue with callous
abandon like a bull in a china shop, eyes on the prize of the entry point to the
human circulatory system. The oxygen that was needed to fuel Leah’s body looked
on in horror as the smoke particles took their place on the express train to the
brain, depositing their final gift into the receptacle that was designed exclusively for
life-sustaining oxygen – a blob of pure nicotine.
The smoke, having served its purpose, reversed course and made it’s way back
out, leaving a trail of sticky black tar and doing all of its damage all over again to
the poor lung tissue that had undergone a burning beating just moments before. If
lungs had nerve endings, there is no doubt Leah would be doubled over in pain
right now.
Simultaneously, the nicotine molecules entered her bloodstream and made their
way to her brain. At the blood-brain barrier, the nicotine passed through, and once
in the brain, the nicotine did what it does best. It found the correct bank of
receptors, and entered them. Leah’s newly rediscovered nicotine virginity wasn’t
even going to make it to its second birthday.
The receptors, now dormant after 20 years of constant feeding, switched back on.
The internal chorus of hungry nicotine monsters in Leah’s head had started
chanting once again, and they were not going away. The addiction machine was
back in action, and once the nicotine had been consumed an order was given to
release the dopamine floodgates.
Back in the real world, Leah pursed her lips and exhaled a tight cone of residual
smoke, returning Sarah’s earlier favour by aiming it directly towards her. Her brain
felt warm, and a wave of happiness emanated from her forehead. She couldn’t
help but smile. Her fingers were tingling, her lungs felt full, and her mouth had
regained that aromatic taste of America’s best cigarette brand. She was back in the
game.
Sarah, having quit before, knew exactly what Leah was feeling.
“How is it?”, she asked.
“Exxxcellent”, Leah purred, as she bought the cigarette back up to her lips for her
second drag of the year. She clamped the cigarette firmly in her mouth and sucked
hard, repeating the process all over again. Her brain may have felt warm but was
she not satisfied – not yet. She wanted more… she needed more.
“Truly excellent”, she thought to herself. Why had she ever given this up?
The Marlboro woman was back in town. Now she just had to break the news to her
boyfriend.
by Select Efficiency