Oh Smoke...

My heart is bursting. I won't ask you if you know the feeling because I've most likely have asked you this before, and let's be honest, this isn't the first time I feel it (this year!) but that doesn't make it any less impressive and important. This is a chilly morning where I woke up and fell hopelessly, helplessly in love with a friend. ^_^ I'm walking on clouds, smiling without reason, feeling butterflies in my stomach... the whole nine yards. Yay! I'm in LOVE!

Well, this morning she posted a wonderful, wonderful picture in my wall. This one:

Since then the moon and the sun turn around her. :-) I can't begin to explain the ten thousand levels in which this picture works for me, and she, this wonderful goddess of beauty and imagery wrote to it "makes me think of you". ^_^ Yes, I've been in a sort of hype about Skyfall that couldn't be hidden even if I wanted to. (I'd like to watch it dubbed to Hungarian, just to see if they played the same tricks they did in the Spanish dubbing.) However it's... the whole deal. My current favorite actor, the smoking, the chains, the sort of message you can read of "chain smoking" and "chained to smoking"... these are driving me wild.

It might be a cultural thing, or Hyne knows what, but there's a thing about smoking that's terribly enticing. No, smoking doesn't make you sexy, and there's a lot of people smoking that doesn't move anything on you, but then there's a certain way of smoking, on certain people that make it all mind blowing. There's a certain sensuality in smoking, in the whole process of it, that engages all you senses and intoxicates you. The sounds, the clicking of the lighter, the burning of the tobacco and the paper, the soft, muted pop as the cig is lit. The scent of the cig, some of which are downright wonderful - kreteks(*) (usually smoked only by women) and red Marlboro's - that pulls with it taste and touch, a warmth and a leafy-woody taste I could spread on bread any morning and make my day perfect.

Then, as you pull the smoke in and down, it's more of a sensorial experience, really like breathing down a soft, silky ribbon that caresses ever so gently your insides and makes them warmer. Your breathing slows down, adjusts to the intake of prepared tobacco and your whole being relaxes. You concentrate in breathing in ways that can only be otherwise achieves in yoga. Air mingled with this beautiful, delicious, organic taste and smoke is precious, and each gout of it is to be savored. You can enter a new sense of awareness as you put the cig between your lips, or you watch someone smoke. Mouth, hands, cheeks, nose, throat... And thus taste and touch gives way to sight, the show of curls of smoke blown out or let escape like a spirit, a burning soul slowly reaching to the universe. A smoke warm to the touch, organic to the taste, muted and crispy around the edges to the ear and leafy to the smell.

Daniel Craig smokes in "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo", and that makes me smile and wish I didn't have asthma, so I could lit up a cig as well.

(*) Kreteks are flavored cigarettes with really high contents of tar and nicotine, higher than those found in a red Marlboro, which is among the highest available in the regulated market. One of the most common kreteks are the clove ones, which are known for being rolled in black paper.