Smoke in the Cold

I watched a man smoke outside on the sidewalk this morning. He had a wool coat and a face like a riverbed—lined, quiet, used to waiting. The smoke curled up and disappeared, the way stories do when no one writes them down.

We live in a time that hates smoke. We hate the smell, the stain, the suggestion of death. We speak in warnings: Dangerous. Addictive. A sign of poor choices. But there was a time when to smoke was not to sin. It was to mark the end of a meal, or a long silence. It was something to do with your hands while thinking. It was a fire you held close.

My grandfather painted watercolors and smoked until the brush fell from his hand. He did not jog. He did not count steps. He lived. So did my mother, though the smoke took her earlier. This is not a contradiction. It’s a truth with two faces.

We think ritual is dead, that the sacred must be pure—clean food, clean lungs, clean data. But ritual isn’t about purity. It’s about being here. Lighting something. Waiting. Breathing in and breathing out. Žižek might say: the ideology is not in the smoke, but in our certainty that we’ve outgrown the need to smoke.

To some, the cigarette is a finger raised to the sky. To others, a prayer. I don’t smoke. But I watch the smoke rise like a flag from a small country in exile. And part of me understands it. That need to say—I’m still here. On my terms.