A Smoking Wreck
I’d been using for a year and it didn’t help, not in the least. No, actually I think it made it worse. I put that last patch on and tossed the wrapper where it is, and then, right there, I just had to have a smoke, right away. I couldn’t help myself.
I don’t know where I got my smokes; I had the pangs and I looked down and, I don’t know, I don’t get it, I had a full pack right in my hand. I hesitated, rolling it over in my palm. It was a brand I hated; I never would’ve bought it back in the day. Not that it mattered now. I cracked it open and smoked the whole thing, cigarette after cigarette, butt after butt. I finished it off and crumpled up the case and for a moment I felt alive. Then for fifteen minutes after all I exhaled was smoke. I was in a fog wherever I went. Then I went home.
I don’t deserve this, man. I did everything I could. I put those patches on, I smoked them, I ate them, everything short of some pretty nasty things that - don’t judge me, not as desperate as I am, not when you would too - I’m actually considering doing. I just want everything to end. I want to end it all.
I sat down in my shitty leather recliner and sighed out a puff of tobacco. The TV was on; I had forgotten to turn it off when I left. One of those anti-tobacco commercials was playing. You know, the ones that sneer at tobacco corporations for effectively marketing their product. It was at the end, and it had just cut away from a cowboy on a fake set to show an old man with emphysema in a wheelchair in a hospital that looked very, very real.
"You could end up like me," he wheezed out.
Don’t ask me how, but the TV ended up a smoking, smouldering wreck out on the parking lot. It just happened.