A cigarette is not just a cigarette. It is a pause, a brief escape, a reason to step away from things that demand too much. It is the quiet companion of people who need silence, the fleeting ritual of those who have made peace with their own contradictions.
I have made choices—some deliberate, some impulsive, and many I can’t even justify to myself. I have given false hopes, broken promises, and ruined things that should have been left untouched. I have murdered emotions, dreams, and expectations of people closest to me, again and again. Not because I wanted to, but because, sometimes, being myself meant making choices that others could never understand.
A cigarette burns the way regrets do—slow, smoldering, turning into something unrecognizable before vanishing altogether. Inhaling is easy. Exhaling is another story. It’s a strange kind of comfort, knowing that every drag takes something away, replaces something else. Maybe it’s why people smoke when they’re thinking. Maybe it’s why I do.
I read, trying to understand too many things at once. I act, slipping into different versions of myself like poorly rehearsed roles. I live, trying to answer obscure questions before they swallow me whole. And I love—sometimes recklessly, sometimes inadequately, sometimes in ways that don’t make sense even to me.
I tell myself there’s no room left to feel true pain, that I have numbed myself past the point of breaking. But the truth is, I fight the idea of pain more than pain itself. So, I write. I write to disagree with voices I hear too often. I write to fight against the things I cannot change. I write because if I don’t, the weight of everything I try to ignore will sink me.
Some wounds are silent, like the ones carried by those who share your blood. The kind you don’t speak of but feel every time their name is mentioned. There is a darkness in that silence, a weight that lingers even when you pretend it doesn’t exist. I want to scream names into the air, let the world know what they have done, but I also want to bury them deep inside my own web of injustice. Both at once.
The ember glows, flickers, dies. Every cigarette is a slow farewell—an ending, a resolution, a metaphor too obvious to ignore. It is not a healthy habit, but neither is overthinking. And yet, we do both.
Some days are meant to bring people together, to heal old wounds. But not all wounds are meant to be healed. Some are meant to be carried. Some days are just meant to remind you why you prefer solitude in the first place.
A cigarette and solitude—two things that rarely do you any good, yet somehow feel necessary.