Smoking and Writing

I wake up every morning, and before frying a couple of eggs, I reach for my favorite pack of cigarettes, grab one and light it. The first days I did this my body tried to tell me how awful that was, but my writings improved significantly. I like to call it the writer’s curse, but it affects any other artist too. There is something about smoking that makes whatever you’re doing better. Sure it kills, or well, it accelerates the process of dying. The real question would be if living long but with miserable or below average writings is worth it. Nothing tackles sadness like a cigarette, a piece of paper and a pen. Maybe the final product feels more intimate and real because the writer is indeed dying a little bit while producing such piece of art. Tabacco is to writers what morphine is to an agonizing man, both cease pain, different types of pain but pain at the end and both slowly kill. A double purpose creation. To every woman that I have loved, I dedicate a night with my old friend the smoke and my great inspiration, her love.

© Gabriel Berm