The beginning

I hate coming out of the bedroom in the morning to a living room that reeks of smoke. It’s just not the way I like to start a new day. The bedroom is clean and fresh and promising, the sun shines through the windows - and then I get hit in the face by those billows of second hand smoke. Now, I enjoy a good smoke. I thoroughly enjoy my cigarettes, thank you very much. But that is just it: they are MY cigarettes and that is my smoke, and I certainly don’t mind that. Although sometimes I do smoke too much... Still, it’s one thing to suffer my own smoke, my own untidiness and all the other consequences of being me, and quite another to put up with someone else’s. So I guess that is why I am, yet again, single.

I thought I had it covered this time. I thought I was doing things right, not putting myself first, making room for someone else in my smoke, sorry, life etc, etc, etc. And yet it did not work.

Now, I know all the arguments, all the kind, loving, supportive bullshit that we pass among ourselves when someone hurts – “it’s best this way, dear”, “it could have been much worse, honey”, “it’ll pass, sweetie”, “someone better will come along, kid” etc, etc, etc. We all know those lines and we all believe them heartily when we pass them along to the poor suffering bum of the moment we care about and try to comfort. I also know that between the more or less comforting talks the bum gets torn up between melancholy, disappointment, regret, angry spells, hopelessness, doubts and fears and determination, optimism, jolliness in the face of hardship, courage, hope and prayers. Yet the one thing that never changes is that, like me, the bum (who dat?) is left with a room full of smoke and a peculiar reluctance to vent and let it out.

For what better simile is there for my head (read life) right now, than “a room full of smoke”? When I say better, I mean more useful, more inviting and inspiring to pick up and move on. For I do not wish to suffer, I wish to thrive (think Eddie Izzard at his best dressed to kill voice).

I won’t hang on to broken dreams, I’ll dream new ones. Clean and fresh and promising ones, like my favourite mornings. Now, dear God, show me the way to the window and let me open it right and wide and...

PS ... and they put all the right things right where they belong and they're real plain to see; like the lines in Batman's beginnings about overcoming fear and about falling as a means to learn how to pick up and keep going. Good ones. Thumbs up and smirk.