the nicotine addiction.

I light my first cigarette of the evening. My friends glamorize the need for nicotine as if it’s some fashionable accessory, while I silently beg my lungs for mercy, trying and failing to quit. The truth settles in the smoke around me: I may not be able to stop. Not yet. Maybe not for a long time. Because this isn’t just addiction. It’s a tether. A ritual. A memory.

It’s a conversation with a ghost.

Every inhale pulls me closer to my father. The same man who once looked me in the eyes and said, “Don’t continue. It’s going to kill you.” And for a while, I listened. But then he left. And when he did, the only thing he left behind for me was this — a cigarette every four days, a whispered presence in every puff.

He finds ways to speak to everyone else.

The wind wraps around my mother’s shoulders. Birds sing for my aunt. A melody will play and someone will say, “He’s here.” My cousin once told my mother he saw him in a dream—sitting in a golden palace, smiling, saying he’s okay.

Everyone gets a visit.

Everyone except me.

Maybe he thought dying on my birthday would be enough of a sign — a way to say, “I’ll never leave your side.” But he never came to me. Not in a dream. Not in a vision. Sometimes my playlist shuffles to seven Michael Jackson songs in a row. Maybe that’s him. Maybe that’s all I’ll ever get.

And still, I smoke.

Not because I want to. I hate it. I hate the way it clings to my clothes. I hate the yellowed fingers, the ash on my lips, the fog in my lungs. I hate the way it makes me need it. I never wanted this.

But it’s the only way he answers.

I used to show off to the cool kids in my class and tell them how I was so cool by smoking this and that. I would make myself impressive to my friends by drinking and swaying and doing all that nonsense. I would make a fool out of myself just to be liked—by hurting myself. I wasn’t always the smartest kid. But I was the most creative, that’s for sure.

Right now, smoking became this ritual. It became the equivalent of a Ouija board, communicating with the ghosts of my late relatives. Telling them, silently, that someday—sooner or later—I will be something none of them thought I would be.

With every puff, as the smoke wraps around my ribs and fills the hollowness I try to hide, I rise. I rise into him. Into memory. Into some imagined space where nicotine particles carry his voice, his scent, his hand on my back.

And in that space, I am not alone.