Word Vomit: 1000 words in 15 minutes unedited

I was up at 640am due to natural causes. I had a rather strange dream involving the tacit witnessing of some unorthodox sex practices, but regardless I went to bed before 2am, and I woke up at 640am. I had several hours of sleep the day before, too- from 2pm to about 6pm, maybe, so I think I did get a full 8 hours of sleep last night. I do feel rather well rested. This hasn’t happened in months and it feels amazing. (I spent the last 30 minutes on the internet, though, and if I hadn’t cut myself off before that, things could have gotten ugly.)

I have with me an ice cold glass of water, as is my morning routine. My eyes are crusty and my lips are charred. My lips are charred because I was smoking before I went to sleep- I had maybe 3 or 4 cigarettes yesterday, which is fewer than I normally do when I meet my friends.

It occurs to me that, if I had started smoking in 2007, that I have been smoking for half a decade now. Wow, that’s a really long time. That’s 60 months of smoking. At 5 packs a month, that’s 300 packs of cigarettes, or 6,000 cigarettes. That almost seems too little. I suspect I might have smoked more than that. Maybe I can somewhat take comfort in the fact that it’s unlikely that I’ve hit 10,000 cigarettes yet. Maybe I don’t want to hit that number.

You know, there’s no way you can do something consistently for 5 years and not have it change you somehow, both superficially and at a deep level. It becomes a part of you, both good and bad. It changes you, in ways both good and bad (though I suppose health-wise you could say more bad than good, for sure.) I’d like to steer away from romanticizing smoking, but I’d also like to avoid an overly harsh “I am a slave to cigarettes” perspective either. I find both perspectives to be overly simplistic, brutish and ultimately unconvincing. I’d like to be honest and real.

How much right does a person have to talk about something if they’ve only been at it for 5 years? I’m more of a smoker than someone who just picked it up, but that old uncle at the coffeeshop who’s been smoking for 60 years, he knows some things that I definitely don’t. I wonder what those things are. I almost wonder if I’d like to find out.

The answer will always be changing, there is never a definitive moment, as far as I can tell. I do know that I don’t want to reach a full decade of smoking. I don’t think that’s something that I want on my life-resume. Half a decade seems about good enough. I have learnt most of what I want to learn from this process, I have met the people I’d like to meet, I have done the time, gotten the insights and perspectives, I can sit and meditate and reflect on all the 6,000 smokes I’ve had without smoking 6,000 more, I’m sure.

I miss fresh air. Pure fresh air. I’ve had it here and there, when I go a few days without smoking, but I get the sense that it can get a lot fresher if I let it. I also miss NOT having my lips charred and burnt. Smoking really fucks up your teeth and gums- I’m pretty sure my gums are actually beginning to recede, and my teeth are stained, and… I don’t like it. I don’t. I am not curious as to what it will look like 6,000 cigarettes from now. I have plenty of people to study for that.

I don’t suppose I will ever quit 100%, you know, and I don’t suppose you ever really can… maybe I will, I don’t know, these things are really silly and stupid and hard to talk about. Why do we pretend like we know anything about our future selves, why do I? (There’s an answer to that, I guess- we want to feel prophetic, we want to have power and dominion over our past and future selves in some way, but least often by actually putting in the effort and time to do the meaningful work that needs to be done).

My friend’s dad is dying of lung cancer, and the doctors say he has about 6 months left. He’s not a smoker. He’s a nice, cheerful and healthy old man, as far as I know, and he would chide us for smoking, I am sure. He lived a good life, and life threw him a little fuck you towards the end that he didn’t quite deserve- but life is life and trying to make sense of it in human terms, in teleological terms- is a fruitless endeavour.

He’s still alive lah so I don’t want to be too dramatic but I will carry him with me and I will think of him when I smoke. My dad’s over 60 and he’s been smoking for like 50 years and today when I was carrying furniture down from a friend’s HDB flat I recognized his cough from 4 storeys up. Cigarettes do something to you, they do. They change you. They whittle you. I think we do it because we like that, in a way.

I was hoping to say a lot more, to do a lot more, and maybe it will come to me while I run. But I got to head out now, I have 80 words to go and nothing much else to say except that I think I want to quit smoking, I want to make a change, and I have said this multiple times, always meaning it, and never, not at all, all at the same time. If I know anything I know that it will not be a dramatic shift but it will be a slow and gentle decline.

I never had much of a flair for the dramatic.