Phoebe Evans

WINNER

The Acorn Doesn’t Fall Far from the Tree

What is the best feeling in the world? Hearing your baby’s laugh for the first time? Falling in love? Winning the lottery? Wrong. It’s having your first cigarette after a four-hour flight.

I don’t say this to encourage our future tax payers to pick up the habit. They’re more inclined to toot on a watermelon nicotine kazoo anyway, not like us real addicts. The great Agnetha Fältskog famously sang about smoking being her only vice. Well I’m the same, other than all my other vices of course. It’s like a relationship with someone toxic, it’s terrible for you, it may kill you in the end but god does it feel good.

Smoking areas are microcosms of society, truly human zoos, places where we yellow-fingered degenerates gather and set the world to rights. Bonds are built as we shiver together, lighters shared and papers passed, a reason to brush fingers with the fit stranger across the patio. There’s camaraderie in asking someone to join you for a ciggie. Come with me, I want you next to me- five minutes alone is too much for me to bear. 

When I was young - more acorn than child due to my severe auburn bob that gave Anna Wintour a run for her money - my mother told me she used to smoke. In the before years, when I was but an egg rattling around inside her and she a young woman, full of beauty and hidden pain. At the time I was utterly incensed; smoking was the most treacherous thing one could do, second only to my brother drawing pubic hair onto my Barbies. My perfect mother, bending the knee to Father Tobacco? I think not. 

Years later, when she started again, it wasn’t a surprise. I was no longer the girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead and she was no longer who I ran to; she couldn’t be. It is due to her, in fact, that I made my relationship with smoking official. We were no longer sneaking around, the occasional drunken rendezvous, we were serious. 

When she decided to hang herself in the bathroom, I wonder if she contemplated this might be the outcome. Leaving me, leaving us, would cause me to rip off my final hangnail of willpower. Did she smoke just before? Mulling over which knot to use whilst inhaling and exhaling for the final times? I’m not sure. There’s a lot I’m unsure of about her final years, but I know that she found solace in the quiet of smoking a cigarette, and I know that I do too.

I try not to think about it, an incredibly healthy coping mechanism if I do say so myself, but I do. I think about it, about her, when the kettle boils, when the Carpenters play and, primarily, when I smoke. We made sure to bury her with a healthy sprinkling of tobacco and a lighter, as the pharaohs were with their jewels and gold. Perhaps she could light up with a worm down there, hopefully not setting fire to her cardboard coffin in the process. Sometimes I swear she’s sitting outside with me, ready to puff away, until I raise my hand and light empty air. Memories have faded: her scent, her voice, the feeling of scraping her feet with a Ped Egg, can only be accessed through a Vaseline-coated lens. Smoking, though, is tangible. We both felt the same sense of relief, the easing of tension. We are together here.

It makes me feel good to have something in common with her. Anybody would be lucky to have anything in common with her. When she was doing well, nobody could compare. It was unfair really. The fact that I was cut from her may make me biased, but ask anyone who knew her and they will say the same. She had a quality that couldn’t be pinned down - attempting to do so would be like trying to catch smoke. Maybe that’s why she had to go; someone so generous, warm and intelligent could not continue to exist - too much good centred on one woman caused the universe to become unbalanced, and so the universe stole her back. It would be nice to believe that.

I fear I will never love anyone else as much, and when I catch a glimpse of her reflection looking back at me in the mirror, I try to channel some of that love into myself. It has nowhere else to go after all. One day, I hope, this practice will allow me to give up my other true love. I will finally care enough about myself to stop the act that actively harms me, no matter how good it feels. Something, I think, she would have been happy to see.

Now put that in your pipe and smoke it.