[ Post a Response | The Sublime Desire of Cigarette Smoking ]
Posted by Lara (&v) on July 29, 2007, 8:29 pm
Message modified by board administrator July 29, 2007, 9:08 pm
It's been 12 years since I abandoned my cigarette habit, but just lately I've been thinking more and more about starting up again. Let me explain. For the past few months I've been dating a wonderful man who is a smoker. He knows that for the past 12 years I've managed to suppress the urge to smoke, but what he doesn't know yet is that, increasingly, I want to give into those urges. At this point I have no way of knowing for sure if he'd like me to be a smoker, but the indications are there that he would. Every time I see him smoke I come closer to starting up again, to initiating that sadomasochistic dance between mind and body. I want to force my body back into doing something I know it doesn't want me to do, and my body will rebel at first, but then delight in the abuse. Of course it's reckless and foolish, especially after all these years of abstinence, but I'm drawn to it nevertheless. I want to do it, I think, precisely because it is risky and dangerous. And if I do start smoking again, I'm fairly certain that it won't just be a few cigarettes now and then; no, I will progress right back into the full blown habit I had before. I will be unable to contain it, and that's part of the attraction too. Because both my mind and body want to be dominated by the addiction again. I want to be a slave to tobacco. I want to submit to it willingly, to be transformed by it, to be forced to join an increasingly marginalized group, to walk closer to the edge of the precipice. And even though I need no encouragement, I want the man in my life to feel like he is encouraging me, to feel like he's my guide and mentor. Yes, this is the crux of my fantasy. I want him, ever so gently, to persuade, to prod me into walking down that path towards possible self destruction that he himself has taken. If he weren't a smoker, I wouldn't feel this way. For a non-smoker who encouraged me like this would simply be a voyeur, like the boy who dares his friends to do something risky without having the courage to do it himself, and then engages in a kind of schadenfreude as he delights in their inevitable missteps. But my mentor is an accomplished smoker himself; he has walked much closer to the edge than any non-smoker has. Perhaps he has already suffered a few of the inevitable consequences of his chosen lifestyle. And now he wants to take me there too, to join him at the edge, and to survey the dangerous landscape beyond. In my fantasy, he doesn't want me to know that he feels this way, but I do know, and it excites me. And if in the dark recesses of his mind he takes a secret pleasure in noticing the little milestones of my inevitable slow but steady decline, then that completes my fantasy. Because I do so willingly in full knowledge of where this might end.
v notes: Just corrected at typo at Lara's request in a now deleted reply.
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