His hand shook with a slight tremor as he took a long and hungry drag of the cigarette. He breathed the smoke deep into his lungs with the cold winter air, forgetting but for a moment the piercing wind and enjoying the feeling of an eternal craving quenched. For a moment he felt satisfied, as his mind suddenly seemed to open up; the clarity of drinking ten cups of coffee in a breath invigorated his soul. "This is life," a voice told him from within the deep recesses of the unconscious.
Then, the bitter taste of the cheaply made cigarette, the tobacco and the leaf in which it was wrapped, struck him as a hammer on his tongue. For a moment he was disgusted, absolutely repulsed by the aftertaste, but like with every other bitterness that comes with the short-lived pleasures of life, he became used to it. Indeed, he received a perverse enjoyment from it.
"Wow, I could really get used to this," he said aloud to his friends, who responded with laughter and chiding humour. "Well, you probably shouldn't smoke anymore then," they said; "You don't want to get addicted." More laughter.
But he knew even as he laughed in retort that they were joking, that the simple pleasure of a slow, "classy way of committing suicide" as Vonnegut had once described it would not be denied him and indeed that it could not be denied him. This was his expression of freedom, to do it for the sake of doing it.
Thinking thus, and taking a few last drags of the quickly extinguishing cigarette, he stepped out the last sparks and lit another and took another drag, reliving that first moment all over again.
