The ascetic heart

“This really grosses you out, doesn’t it?”

It wasn’t until she asked that I finally understood what was happening. I might have noticed sooner had I not become so immersed in the eccentric poetry of her plan. But she had coaxed me in unaware.

She had begun with the lure: “I will throw myself with abandon into altruism.”

At those words I momentarily imagined we would plot like fevered superheroes against the villainous masses. They would learn, change, grow, build and heal. And all beneath our guiding hands.

As it turned out, only she would ever heal them. And this year off from medical school provided her the time and the setting to begin. You see, the key to unlocking and entering your target’s heart is to know what already lies within. So she determined to understand her future patients by becoming one of them.

At first she brought it up in passing, almost as a joke. “I think I want to be a psychiatrist,” she opened, and mentioned that she’d worked with addictions. She noticed that one demographic in particular suffers as much in being addicted as in trying to quit. And in our attempt to eradicate second-hand symptoms, our society has created a second-class citizen.

Smokers suffer physically – lungs, lips, skin and voice grow coarse, pale, brittle. Socially – exiled from restaurants, clubs, homes, and relegated to icy stoops, vacant patios or blistering pavement. And emotionally – rejected alongside the drinkers, the gamblers, the druggies and other undesirable loves. Yet the unmitigated agony of withdrawal somehow makes all that suffering palatable.

So in August she smoked her first pack. Week 1 of 52.

...

At the beginning of the year we sat out on the balcony. The night chill penetrated our bones. She turned to me and raised a cigarette. “Would this bother you?” It would, for her sake more so than my own. She understood, but brought it to her lips and lit up all the same.

I imagined tracing the dry winter air. Its pencil-drawn vapors wafting by the silent skyline, approaching her pale lips, being drawn toward and in through the fiery glow. Heating, permeating her chest and warming her from within before being returned to the night.

Her shivers soon subsided. She extinguished the glow. And we returned to the non-smoking apartment. I should have realized it that night. But as I said, the noble sacrifice so fascinated me that I – like the vapors – was only drawn closer.

...

Intermission marked two hours since the last cigarette. She checked her watch to confirm. So while the rest of the theater audience filed off to the washrooms and snack bar, she stepped out the entrance to perpetuate her experiment.

By now she was committed. No amount of reasoning could sway the course of her research. Yet I tried.

I explained the obvious – opting to get hooked differs from experiencing an environment that leads to addiction. Scheduling a smoke differs from desiring one. Selecting locations that isolate smokers differs from being unable to avoid them.

Eventually, though, she reasoned, the addiction would blur those differences. She’d no longer need to rely on her plan. She’d simply need, crave and conceal. And she was probably right.

But one factor was still missing. One pain that smokers suffer. One key that locks their hearts away from the clean and sober lab coats who peer down bifocals with clueless contempt.

She blew a column of smoke up, away and over our heads, glared into my eyes, and flatly said, “This really grosses you out, doesn’t it?”

And as she breathed deeply, in calm, rehearsed anticipation of the answer, I finally understood her motive: in this phase of her research, she wasn’t the subject. I was.

So I could only give her the result she sought. That it did. That the foul scent alone turned me away. And that each nicotine kiss repulsed. Just as expected.

We parted that night.

I tried a few times to reconnect. To offer an ear. A shoulder. But she had already collected her data, and by then there were other selfless tasks to throw herself into, so that one day she might heal.