In her columns, our collaborator Nathalie Plaat calls on your stories. In his Letter to the woman who smokes, she asked to read your letters of love, breakup or relapse to your lost identities or with which you are in constant negotiation to stay “healthy”. The “News from you” section offers you an answer.
This story is first and foremost that of a heartbreak, that of a woman who managed to say goodbye to cigarettes. Not without difficulty. I often have the impression of having inherited a body that has not adapted to changes. An interior clock connected to the seasons, the weather, the sun. A genetic baggage inherited from prehistoric times, an entity having accumulated a lot of knowledge and trying desperately to transmit it to me. His quiet strength eventually regains the upper hand, by having the last gesture, by prescribing his necessities to me.
When I go back to smoking, I’m in the little birds, I rediscover the happiness of the cigarette, I revel in its pleasures, its accompaniment. And then, a few months later, my vice poisons me, I’m short of breath, too tired, an irresistible impulse makes me fill my ashtray. I lower my arms before the limits of my carcass and I agree to hear what my cough is whistling at me: I smoke too much, I smoke too much.
My happiness has a short life, my body wants a long life. Its old wisdom seeps into my consciousness and imposes its message ever louder, hypnotizes me like the rhythm of tom-toms, quit-smoking, quit-smoking, quit-smoking. If my sons surprise me with a cigarette between their lips, they teach me a lesson: I abuse my body, I subject it to physical abuse that is not without consequences, which could well cause me to die prematurely.
They are very politically correct, they do not want consented pollution, claimed irresponsibility. The eldest leads the way, he fiercely opposes my pleasure, he barks, he bites, like the watchdog that he is of this national treasure, of this mother-matrix bearing questions of life and death. that he vaguely feels already being formulated deep within himself. One day, he will have to reconcile his little selfish self with the big universal self that wants all men to be equal before all men. When he is a man before being a son, he will be alone in love, like you and me.
I let myself be tossed about by the wind of his imprecations, I somehow protect my little me who doesn’t want to grow up, who doesn’t want to mourn this toxic pleasure, this thumb that I put in my mouth to m to help cross the momentary river of my anguish, to the other bank, to the appeasement that a blue, silky body provides for this tiny little girl that I am and who smokes rather than crying.
One day, when I will have grown old, I will be able to let my anxieties flow very slowly, without dynamiting them with my little tobacco sticks. Perhaps my body will have passed away before me. Who can tell how long it takes for souls to accept the unavoidable solitude of the body, its atavistic wisdom?