Take That First Puff

Take that first puff.

Come on. You know you want to.

Inhale.

Feel the smoke fill your nostrils, the oh-so familiar scent that smells oh-so good, and you close your eyes and savour and let the calmness rush over you as you continue breathing in the smoke. Feeling the rush to your head that justifies even picking up that little rolled up piece of paper.

To satiate that need, that craving that lies within you.

And the chemicals work their magic inside your body. Working their way down to your lungs, cells inside your lungs dying and desperately trying to fight those nasty little chemicals attacking them, expelling and oozing yellow pus that fills your alveoli and clogs up your previous lungs, and for a moment, you felt like you couldn't take a breath, and the hacking cough racks your body.

And perhaps one day, those cells can no longer take the abuse and slowly change into those slow, cancerous cells that engulf your organs and betray your own body responses, and as you throw up from the radiotherapy and chemotherapy, you wonder what you did to deserve this hell.

And the chemicals activate those sympathetic nerves in your body, and they fire at will, affecting your body systems, but masked subtly by the alertness and wonderful sensations you feel inside you head. And in the meantime, they fire away, making those blood vessels contract, causing the pressure inside to increase slowly, day by day.

And perhaps one of those days, a blood vessel might finally break and the blood will leak out like a damn, flooding your brain as the stroke paralyses your reactions as you gasp your dying breaths. Or perhaps, a clot will break off suddenly from the buildup of cholestrol you slowly accumulate in your arteries, and lodge in your heart and you moan as the dull, crushing pain of a heart attack hits you.

And all this while, you continue smoking in your blissful ignorance, or perhaps, blissful avoidance, while your body dies a little with every breath.

And perhaps, years down the line, you view the tear-streaked faces of your loved ones as you lie dying and you wish you had never quite gone down that path.

Go on. Keep on smoking.

I dare you.