When I was seven years old, I used to love playing with shadow puppets. I watched as the animals I created on the wall grew larger or smaller depending on how close my fingers were to the lamp that served as my spotlight. Sometimes my brother was there to provide my performance with sound effects, while my mother stood beside him, clapping at what now seems to be nothing more than dark, primitive figures on a two dimensional plane. My father, if he had the time after work, would stand nearby, and I would watch as the shadows created by his cigarette smoke would be pulled into the light and merge with my animals. It twisted and turned in the air, taking on any shape it desired, fluid and free.
My mother was a neat lady. She cleaned the house almost everyday so that the house would look as new as when we first bought and refurnished it. But always, there was that fine layer of smoke in the air, lingering and clinging to whatever lay in its path. As I grew older, I started to notice what it was doing to me. It made my nose and chest feel strange, and I grew angry at the source of the smell—my father. When I was nine, I started to complain. My mother made excuses for him; she said smoking was the way he dealt with the stress he felt from work. I told her that my best friend’s father worked all day too but that he had never lit a cigarette in his life.
When I was eleven years old, I learned about nicotine. It pulled a person in like the lamplight that had drawn the smoke to its bulb during my puppet show. Once a person became addicted, it was impossible to stop. But, it wasn’t impossible. I had two uncles who had quit smoking because they either had a job that did not permit them to smoke inside the workplace or because their children had pleaded for them to stop. Their stories fed the spite I had for my father. Was smoking worth more to him than his wife and two children? I once stole some of the cigarettes in a pack he had just opened so that he wouldn’t be able to smoke them. He scolded me and made me return them.
By the time I was fourteen, I was sure of two things. The fumes were killing him. They were killing us. Because that was the year I found out I had asthma. That was the year I stopped talking to my father. And that was the year he stopped smoking his cigarettes.
He had ten packs of cigarettes left in his wardrobe. They were gifts from family members. I saw them as items that read ‘I hope you die soon.’ Three weeks after I was diagnosed with asthma and had started my silent treatment, my father gave me his cigarettes—all ten packs of them. He said I could do whatever I wanted with them. He said he was sorry. He said he hoped I would forgive him. And secretly, I hoped that I could forgive him too. Just as he had once been a prisoner to his cigarettes, I was becoming a prisoner to my hatred. It blackened my heart like cigarette smoke had blackened his lungs.
I cried a lot that night. I ripped the boxes open and took the cigarettes apart. I didn’t care that tobacco was littering my mother’s perfectly mopped floors. I wanted to destroy them. I wanted to burn them. Then again, burning cigarettes had started this whole mess. I wanted to hurt them like they had hurt me, but I couldn’t because you can’t hurt something that was never alive. After every cigarette had become a pile of shredded paper and tobacco dust, I flushed them, one pile at a time, down the toilet.
