Monologue of a Man in His Sixties!

I am sixty. Or so they tell me. I haven’t counted in years. Time, like most things, became unnecessary once I realized nothing really changes except the body’s ability to endure it.

I have been smoking for thirty-five years.

No, that’s not true. I have been with it for thirty-five years. Smoking sounds like an action. This is not an action. This is a relationship.

I remember the first cigarette.

A girl had just left me. Or I left her, I no longer trust my memory on that. It rearranges things to protect me, I think. Either way, I coughed. I remember that clearly. I coughed like my body was rejecting something… and yet I continued.

Strange, isn’t it? The things that hurt us first are often the only things that stay.

I have been rude all my life. To everyone.

Except this one thing.

Which is absurd, if you think about it. To grant more patience to a slow poison than to living people. But then again, people leave. Or perhaps I leave them. The cigarette never does. It waits exactly where I left it, as if it understands something about me that others didn’t, or refused to.

People say it’s harmful.

But tell me, what isn’t, if it stays long enough?

My beliefs were harmful.

Once, I was religious, fiercely so. I used to think I would kill for it. Not metaphorically. Actually kill.

And sometimes I wonder… if that belief had stayed, if it hadn’t burned out like everything else, would I have become that man?

It unsettles me that the answer is not clearly “no.”

But then, my marriage stayed for a while too.

Long enough.

Too long, perhaps.

It’s not that I didn’t love my wife, I did. Or at least I believed I did, which might be the same thing, or might be something much weaker. We had… friction. That’s the polite word. The truth is, we exhausted each other. Every conversation felt like a quiet war that neither of us was willing to admit we were fighting.

And yet we stayed.

Why do people stay inside things that are slowly killing them?

No, that’s not the right question.

Why do they call it love when they do?

We separated in the end. Naturally. Everything ends once it has taken enough from you.

I say I miss her. But what exactly do I miss?

This is where it becomes unclear.

Because when I think of her now, I don’t remember her face very well. Not her laughter either. What I remember most vividly is the heat, the tension, the irritation, the constant presence of something slightly unbearable.

And sometimes, when I smoke, I feel that same heat in my chest.

Which is strange… because it almost feels like she stayed.

Not as a person, but as a sensation.

So perhaps I didn’t lose her.

Perhaps I just… changed the form in which I keep her.

Marriage had always been a fascinating idea to me, two people agreeing, almost ceremonially, to endure each other’s presence until death intervenes out of mercy. I used to wonder how anyone could sustain such an arrangement. But then again, who was I to question permanence? I had been faithful myself, for years, perhaps decades. Not to a person, no… but to something far more patient.

A cigarette never demands explanations.

And yet, it demands everything else.

The doctor said I had something called COPD. He said it carefully, as if naming it too loudly might make it worse. I remember nodding, as though I understood him, as though the word carried weight. It didn’t. Not then.

What did carry weight was the strange pause between his sentences, like he was waiting for me to become someone else. Someone who would say, “I’ll stop.”

I didn’t.

In fact, I think I disappointed him in a very quiet way. The kind of disappointment that doesn’t express itself, only withdraws.

I stepped out, lit a cigarette, and felt… not relief exactly, but a kind of restoration. As if something in me had been briefly threatened and I had defended it.

But what exactly had I defended?

My wife always believed she was fighting for me.

Which is strange, because I never remember asking to be saved.

She became, in my narrative, the antagonist. Not because she was cruel, but because she insisted on interrupting my decline. And there is something deeply irritating about being interrupted when one is falling deliberately.

I told myself I chose the cigarette over her.

But that isn’t entirely true, is it?

Because a choice suggests freedom. And I’m not entirely convinced I had any.

After she left, something changed, not dramatically, not in the way stories prefer, but subtly, like a shift in air pressure. I smoked more, of course. That part is obvious.

But it wasn’t the increase that mattered.

It was the absence of resistance.

Before, every cigarette was a small rebellion. After, it became… routine. And rebellion without opposition is just habit.

So what exactly was I rebelling against all those years?

Her?

Or the possibility that she might have been right?

I told myself cigarettes replaced her.

But that’s a comforting lie. Because a cigarette does not replace a person, it only replaces the noise a person makes in your conscience.

And silence… silence is very easy to live with.

I’ve seen many doctors since then. Older ones, tired ones, some who spoke like they had already accepted my death on my behalf. I respected them more, I think. There’s honesty in resignation.

But this last one, a young man, almost disturbingly alive, looked at me as though I were a problem to be solved.

He said my lungs had lost their “sponginess.” An odd word. Almost childish.

As if my body had once been something soft, something capable of holding air gently… and had now hardened into something less forgiving.

I asked him why I should stop.

He hesitated.

That hesitation interested me more than his answer.

He said I could die.

As if that were new information.

As if I hadn’t been quietly moving in that direction for years, cigarette by cigarette, choice by choice, or whatever it is that resembles a choice closely enough to be mistaken for one.

But what puzzled me was his urgency.

Why was he so invested in prolonging something I myself had never particularly valued?

Or perhaps that’s not true either.

Because if I truly did not value life… why did I feel the need to argue for my way of living it?

I told him death is liberating.

He didn’t agree.

Of course he didn’t, he still had time to lose.

But I wonder… if death is so undesirable, why do we spend our lives rehearsing it in smaller forms?

Slow neglects. Quiet abandonments. Habits that erode us gently enough that we can still call it living.

He looked at me like a man trying to fix something already broken.

But I’m not sure I’m broken.

Or perhaps I am, and I’ve simply grown accustomed to the shape of it.

And here is the part I do not like to admit:

Sometimes, in the brief space between two cigarettes, when my chest feels unusually tight and the air refuses to come easily… I think of her.

Not with regret.

No, that would be too simple.

But with a kind of… irritation.

As if she left too early.

As if she abandoned the argument before I had fully won it.

They call me an addict because I smoke. It is a convenient accusation, clean, visible, almost charitable. Smoke has a smell; it lingers, it betrays. One can wrinkle the nose and feel morally superior in the same breath.

But what of those whose addictions leave no trace? Or worse, leave a trace so admired that it is mistaken for virtue?

No, no… I must be careful. This already sounds like an excuse. And perhaps it is nothing but an excuse. I have always had a talent for justifying myself, especially when I am most in the wrong.

Still, I cannot help noticing it.

A man wakes early, drinks his measured glass of warm water, counts his steps as if eternity were tallying them beside him. He avoids poison, avoids indulgence, avoids decay with a discipline I almost envy. And yet he dies. Quietly, respectably, perhaps even proudly, but he dies all the same.

So what was he preserving? And from what?

No… that’s unfair. It must be unfair. There is something petty in me that wants to drag everyone down to my level, as if equality in weakness could pass for truth.

And yet I smoke.

Not out of rebellion, how childish that would be. Not out of pleasure either; I stopped confusing it with pleasure long ago. There are moments, quite sudden and without warning, when I look at the cigarette between my fingers and feel nothing but a kind of mild astonishment.

As if I had discovered a stranger living in my hands.

In those moments, it appears entirely unnecessary. Not immoral, not dangerous, simply… irrelevant. Like a habit that has outlived the person who once needed it.

And then a question arises, quiet but persistent:

If it is so unnecessary, why has it survived me?

I cannot answer it.

Or rather, I answer it too quickly, which is worse.

I tell myself it is weakness. Then I tell myself it is conditioning. Then I invent more elegant explanations, psychological, philosophical, until the whole thing begins to resemble a system, something almost respectable in its complexity.

But I distrust systems.

I have seen what happens when a man builds his life upon one.

There was a time, not long ago, though it feels like it belonged to another man, when I had what I might call a revelation. Not dramatic, no lightning, no trembling heavens. It came quietly, almost politely, like a guest who does not wish to disturb the house.

I realized, quite plainly, that this habit of mine, this smoking, had no real claim over me. It was not essential. It did not define me. It did not even satisfy me.

It was, in the simplest terms, unnecessary.

And you would think that such clarity would bring freedom.

But clarity… is a dangerous thing.

It does not liberate as often as it concludes.

It was like a priest discovering, not that he had doubts, no, doubts can be lived with, but that there is nothing left to doubt. That the structure itself is hollow. That all the prayers, the rituals, the sacrifices were offered to an absence so complete it cannot even be called silence.

What does such a man do the next morning?

Does he rejoice in his freedom? Or does he kneel out of habit, and perhaps out of terror?

I did something far more ridiculous.

I smoked.

Yes, precisely because it was unnecessary.

Which, now that I think of it, makes it necessary again, does it not? Or am I twisting words to protect myself from the obvious conclusion?

You see how it goes. Every thought divides against itself before it can stand.

I cannot even accuse myself without immediately suspecting the accusation.

There are moments when I believe I cling to this habit simply because it has accompanied me for so long. Not as a friend, no, I would not grant it that dignity, but as something familiar enough to be mistaken for identity.

And then I wonder…

If I remove it, what remains?

This question, I admit, frightens me more than any disease ever could.

Perhaps that is why I distrust clarity. It ends things too decisively. It places a full stop where one has grown accustomed to ellipses.

I have avoided full stops all my life.

Even when my wife left me, yes, she did leave, though I mention it without drama, I made no serious attempt to understand why. There must have been a reason. People do not abandon each other without cause.

And yet, I cannot recall it.

Or perhaps I refuse to.

Because to know the exact reason would be to fix it in place, to give it a shape that cannot be altered. And then what would I do with it? Carry it? Correct it? Repent for it?

No… it is easier not to know.....Or at least, it feels easier.