She smoked little, or in any case she liked to believe it, to say so, as do all those men and women who are a little ashamed of still loving something that has a tendency to kill.
She smoked as one follows Alice’s white rabbit, to reverse the state of her world, to gain access to another part of the night, to declare it open, in fact, the night! She was smoking the way one gives the middle finger to all those frames she was trying to fit into, but which always gave her the effect of clothes that were too tight. She smoked to keep something a little punk in her, to continue to ward off death, to stay still above what in fact terrified her: this possibility that she would die before she had really arrived at live.
She smoked to stay French too, to revive her roots, which brought her back to the other side of the Atlantic. Each time, she thought she was the cover page of Nothing stands in the way of the night, even at 3 o’clock in the morning, leaving a bar, when she walked her town with an inexplicable joy in her heart. A joy that demanded to light one, to grill a last one, by raising the hair to become perhaps a little Charlotte Gainsbourg in They got married and had many children, when, filmed from behind, cigarette in her right hand, she chooses the music, while Yvan falls in love with her again. She smoked to return to a sensuality that gave her the feeling of being in the world, of splitting life as when, as a child, she was moved by the wind on her skin, as if it were already a question of a romantic encounter. . She smoked to slow down time, to breathe in all that had gone up in smoke, the great holes that love had dug in her, all the absences whose memories she had to preserve, in the rooms of her inner museum, classified by order of importance, magnitude, pain. She liked to smoke to revive the possibilities of a world a little less clean, less controlled, less giver of lessons, less busy building and displaying an irreproachable life. She smoked to know what she would be reproached for, to give form to the ontological anguish of guilt that inhabited her. She smoked to stay alive, sometimes, when something too intense passed through her. She smoked to calm herself, to pull herself together, so as not to explode from an overflow of sensitivity. She smoked to become a piece of Philip Glass, to tumble in a fall of notes, in minor, and not really die at the end of the race. She hadn’t found many options for walking around the world with this plexus-tattooed vulnerability: writing, smoking, dancing maybe? She did her best to behave, to evolve between the hypocrisies, the social circuses, the power relations which always put her beside herself, then, so as not to really get out of herself, she lit a cigarette, like Chokri in Imaginary lovers.
She never smoked to “be part of”, on the contrary, and that was her problem. The less it became “trendy” to smoke, the more she still wanted to stand there, next to the trend, precisely, on the edge of the worlds where no one left the restaurant tables between services. She had always found, anyway, that the most interesting people, the most brilliant conversations, the most candid laughs, the best kisses, took place on the balconies at parties, even at thirty, on the sidewalks. to shiver, in front of restaurants, on terraces. What everyone thought was ridiculous, she just found delicious.
Obviously, I had to let her go, and, much more than a vocabulary of struggle, it was an entire lexicon of heartache that allowed me to say goodbye to her definitively, to the woman who smokes, to her and to all the meaning she conveyed to me. Leaving a habit that has held our hand in the intimacy of oneself is always also leaving an identity, a universe of meaning that allowed us to remain ourselves, it was believed. This is why weaning requires, well beyond an iron will, an ability to transform, to dare to take a certain leap into the unknown.
I still miss her, this girl, this young girl who didn’t yet know how much she would love to grow old. She is my youth, my before, the one who carried within her a fire that consumed her, a fire that took a few years of an adult life, yes, to become a burning ember, fuel in the service of self-realization, rather what inferno that was killing her. Leaving her meant for me to assume this fire, to say it, to carry it high and proudly, instead of turning it against me. It was necessary to redevelop the interior, therefore, not only to adopt a new normative behavior.
Many of us carry within us a “woman who smokes”, a “man who drinks too much”, a person who ” game too much, which compels in sex, sugar or Pepsi perhaps, people with whom we negotiate something like “our health”. If all these addictions and other compulsions are not equivalent when it comes to approaching them through the risk they entail, the moralizing and normative discourse, evidence in hand, still remains here deeply reductive of the human experience. . The clinic taught me to identify these changes which consisted only of a facade rede-draping in which the excess had simply changed its object, to throw itself on something socially acceptable: the gym, running , work, food controlled, weighed, codified. While the body could certainly benefit from it, the psyche nevertheless retained its propensity to claim its due, demanding that the interior be rearranged as well. That’s also what being healthy is all about.
Clinical psychologist, Nathalie Plaat is an author and teacher at the University of Sherbrooke.