Posted by Vesperae on July 7, 2009, 3:29 am, in reply to ""My Journey Into The Sublime" / Introduction"
Message modified by board administrator July 7, 2009, 4:27 am

Originally posted to the main forum December 15, 2008. My Journey Into The Sublime By Vesperae After all that has happened, I'm still a good girl. I'm still a nice girl. I'm still a sweet girl. Really, I am. But I am now also other Darker things, as well. I am a Cigarette Smoker. To me, my identity as a smoker suggests a marked contradiction with the more superficial aspects of my personality and most aspects of my everyday outward appearance, a contradiction that symbolizes deeper mysteries and suggests Darker Desires. I am hopelessly lost to the seductive charms of my dangerous lover, Nicotine. She has been my Dark Mistress for more than twenty three years now. More than twenty three years of countless moments spent lingering in the depths of her sweet poisonous kisses. More than twenty three years of dancing slowly, and deliberately, and knowingly, with Death. Puff after puff, cigarette after cigarette, pack after pack. * * * I recall the beginnings of my fascinations with smoking, and my journey into the Sublime inner places of becoming a cigarette smoker, with the lucid flowing clarity of a waking dream that spans my childhood, my adolescence, and my earliest adult years. I was a precocious and endlessly curious child, and it was a moment of innocent curiosity that set the stage for an internal drama that continues to play itself out within my body and my mind to this very day. It all began on a cool autumn morning when I was five. I awoke well before my parents did, and secreted my way into their room as they slept, looking for nothing in particular, just on one of my many childhood curiosity explorations. I noticed that my mother had left her pack of cigarettes on the dresser from the night before, and on sheer impulse, I nervously reached up, grabbed them, and took them with me into my parent's bedroom closet to get a closer look. As I sat on the floor among my mother's heels and used pantyhose, I examined the pack very carefully in my tiny hands, and pulled out one of her Winstons and smelled the subtle rich sweetness of unignited tobacco for the first time. I placed it between my lips and mimicked the gestures of smoking that I had watched my mother do countless times. I sat there in the near darkness and wondered for the first time what it felt like to smoke. After a few minutes, I suddenly became very worried about what might happen if one of my parents awoke and discovered me clutching my mother's cigarettes, so I quickly covered all evidence of my ever being there, returned my mother's pack of cigarettes to it's spot on the dresser, and quietly hurried back to my bed to think about my first physical encounter with a cigarette. The seed of something endlessly enchanting was planted within me in those most innocent of moments, and it began to root itself deeply in my young mind as the events of my childhood continued to unfold. I watched with great interest at every opportunity the obviously abundant pleasure that my mother took in her cigarettes; the way that she gracefully and expertly French inhaled every puff, the way that her chest expanded with every deeply inhaled drag, the way that she would invariably smile when she tilted her chin up and released a big stream of white smoke into the air above her head. My mother always seemed to me to be the height of style and poise with a cigarette in her hand, and I wanted to be seen by others in that same way; so as a five year old, I came to the conclusion that I would almost certainly smoke when I grew up. My beautiful young aunts - all smokers - projected the same kind of style and poise, and when they came to visit would hold me perched on their laps while they smoked cigarette after cigarette. Often I would look up at their smiling faces as they would take another drag. Sometimes I would even deliberately hug them right after they took a drag so that I could feel their chests expanding against my body as they inhaled. There were the pretty young teachers that I had in grade school, and the moments when I would catch glimpses of them smoking in the privacy of their offices or cars. In those unexpected moments, they were suddenly somehow transformed in my imagination into very different women than the seemingly "innocent" ones who stood smiling down at me in their classrooms. And then there were the images to be found on television. Glowing, radiant images that reached out through the shadows of often dark rooms, filling my hungry eyes with a world populated by sophisticated smoking celebrities and glamorous models in cigarette commercials. I was especially taken by the ultimate examples of style and Feminine Beauty - the gorgeous Virginia Slims Girls, with their long, slim, white cigarettes burning in their long, slim, white fingers. The image echoes of them winking over their shoulders at me as they walked gracefully away on the screen will remain forever within me. All of these moments became utterly etched in my young mind; fixed amid the perpetually present dreamlike drifts of cigarette smoke that seemed to waft endlessly around me. And the ever growing stream of warnings about the dire health consequences of smoking became another road to fascination. I was riveted to anti-smoking PSA's on television, health lectures and anti-smoking films in school, even the articles that I could find on smoking in encyclopedias and books that I found in the library. I was profoundly struck by the obvious contradiction of so many people continuing to do something that they now knew was so very, very bad for them. My Enchantment with cigarettes went on and on. * * *