By the dying light...

I love smoking on cold nights. Standing on the verandah in the dark, watching the smoke rising against the distant streetlights down the road, there’s something redemptive in the chilled solace, a real dedication to your craft, even if that craft is slowly killing yourself with nicotine. The red embers flaring as you inhale, occasional glowing specks flying off into the darkness, like monkeys shot into space. Smoke rising slowly from the end of the cigarette as it rests in your fingers, like a solid white line as it leaves from just behind the burning tip, billowing out and tracing a million ever changing images and fractions of images mid air as it rises and dissipates. The almost silence of suburban sprawl at 11:30 at night, a lone semi rumbling down the highway snaking through the town, a tapestry of houses and fast food places the driver won’t be able to distinguish from a million other sprawls he’ll slice through in his metal behemoth. Police sirens are calling from the distance, the locals restless from a week of work and only two days to numb themselves to that week’s endless repetition. A dog is barking, car doors opening and closing, an engine reluctantly ticking to life and my cigarette is still radiating. A familiar tiny crimson dot at the front of a house across the road gives evidence of a fellow devotee of slow nocturnal suicide, solidarity in our exile from our own homes for our shared passion for burning and inhaling tobacco. My cigarette dies before I do, crushed under my foot and left broken and dirty like they say one day it will leave me and if I’m half as lucky, I’ll also die after being taken out of someone’s mouth. Even with the deed done, my presence will bring disdain from those inside, the smell of my transgression lingering in my clothes, my skin, my beard. I will wake up tomorrow hacking and coughing vowing one day I’ll be like them, that I won’t be the outcast banished from decent society. Then I’ll step outside, light up, and see if my neighbour is as dedicated to this is I am.