To The Filter

[TW: Self Harm]

My girlfriend points them out to me: a package of cigarettes in the early stages of scattering across the heaving floor at Sneaky Dee’s Emo Nite. I snatch them from under the feet of the pair of couples making out next to us, place them beside my vodka cooler on the ledge along the wall. No one comes looking. When my girlfriend goes for a second beer, I pocket them.

I started craving cigarettes during my first year at art school the way meat craves to be carved. I’d never smoked before. There was something old and raw about licking my teeth for a flavour I’d never tasted, the ghost of some nicotine addict past digging around inside my soft tissue looking for a light. My mental health was poor. The Vyvanse wasn’t working. If I was one of my characters I’d have been butting out darts on my own arms with shaking hands, but I was real, and a coward, and as years passed the craving dripped down the back of my brain and solidified.

A week or so after Emo Nite, when my apartment is my own again, I dig the cigarettes out of the pocket I’d hidden them in. I don’t know why I hid them from my girlfriend, whether it was the theft or the intention behind it or the simple joy of having something that no one gets to share with me. I guess I do know why.

It’s almost a full pack, although a handful are crushed. I light the first one on a cold night in the motion sensor glow of my back steps. The smoke is warm and dry on my tongue. I’m a child again, breathing ash as I squat at the edge of a bonfire, stirring embers until the poker stick smolders. There’s particles of maple beans and marshmallows and an unbroken family between the nicotine. I smoke slow and deliberate like a manifestation. It comes naturally, and I let it.

When the fire fades it leaves a thick, sticky chemical coating in the lining of my sinuses, dripping down the back of my throat like I’d crushed up the scorched butt and snorted it. I brush my teeth and wash my hair but it doesn’t leave. I figure it’s for the best, that the sensory hell will keep me clean.

Over a month later the packet of cigarettes in my closet is still watching me every morning when I go for my coat. Just like sex and skateboarding and learning to read, the second time is better than the first. I can’t tell if the aftertaste really fades quicker or if I’m already used to it. Every day feels like a good day for the third cigarette, and then the fourth. I start to lose count. I fantasize about the coolness of menthol and the spice of clove. The thrill I could get from smoking in the summer suburbs of a smaller, scrappier city, halfway to a hometown. The cathartic burn that would burrow itself through the layers of my skin if I made an ashtray of my thighs. I guess all the selves you’ve ever been really do still live inside you.

Every time I smoke a cigarette, I try to write the poem of it in my head, just for the content. Every experience that tastes like chemicals is a muse, and everything I write has to be darker, or deeper, more bloodied and bare than the last. When I run out of inspiration I start to hope for new traumas: a minor car crash, witnessing a stabbing, another sexual assault. I can’t tell if the line between the motivation to create and self harm never existed, or if it was erased to feed the narrative of the tortured artist. Rooms full of poets looking at each other and seeing sensitive stock characters riddled with the frustrations of art and society. The problem with myths like those is that we’re obsessed with retellings.

I’ve been reading on the train. It’s more awkward than it looks in the photos of pretty people with collared shirts and lattes you see online. I’m always juggling the jacket folded over my arm and the dregs of a drink and a bag or two, trying to free up the hand and a half needed to steady the spine and flip the pages. I recently finished Crash by JG Ballard. Mine is a thrifted copy with the Cronenberg film cover; a nude Deborah Kara Unger reclining in stark shadow, her breasts censored by a crash test symbol. I wonder if the aesthetic sensibility of reading in public atrophies when the book is obviously some approximation of erotica.

They’re not exactly the same, the book and the film, but they’re similar enough given that almost two and half decades separate them. That surprised me, how relevant the technological concerns of the early 70s were to the mid 90s. While not even three decades have passed yet since the release of the Cronenberg film, it seems like a Crash for our time would be completely deviant from its origins; Catherine vaping in the airport hospital, Seagrave dying in Princess Diana drag, Vaughan video chatting with cam girls in the back of a Tesla.

Ballard’s entanglement of body and machine has been becoming more relevant with each passing moment since it was written, yet the layer of sexuality has not. Perhaps that’s what makes Crash such a comfort to me. Surely if Ballard could present a case for the taboo and erotic in the automobile, already mundane by the time of his book, then new opportunities for perversion must constantly be exposing themselves all around us, tight wet burn-holes gaping though the sterilization of a reclaimed archaic purity.

I try to replace my urge to romanticize with something more visceral. Find the sex in the yellow-white of subway tunnel fluorescents sliding by the train windows like soap sliding down dark thighs. The depravity in the smiles of billboard models, grins that grow layers the longer you look at them. The masturbation in the shuddering rise of an elevator, the heavy pressure of fingernails on a keyboard, the mind-breaking hypnosis of algorithms, the fellatio in smoking.

I find in early 20th century manifestos from art history class readings the same anti-capitalist beliefs I hold now. It's inspiring and awful, an oscillation between intergenerational solidarity and the lament that my world is as mottled with individualistic fascism as theirs was, maybe moreso. It’s hard to avoid the reality that after a century of war and conservatism ebbing and breaking in waves, my peers shoot up the values of Romanticism, a drug that I am not innocent of partaking in myself. It’s easier to be a tortured poet than a revolutionary in an economy like this.

I’m looking at you now. I’m taking your hand. You don’t get to choose whether or not your poetry is propaganda, but you do get to choose what to propagate. Fuck aesthetic pleasures. We have to read porn on the train and smoke stale floor cigarettes. We are sweaty, hairy, ugly animals, and we are going to be happy. We have to be happy. We have to start now.

A Morgan (he/him), is a 4th year Creative Writing student at OCAD University. He's a poet and prose writer, former Pulse member, and his work can be found in lit journals such as Pulse and Camel. His submission here is a work of nonfiction prose and requires a content warning for reference to self harm.