Nothing personal.

Cigarettes and education don't go well together for various and mostly pedantic reasons. On top of the pile is the health issue - which means nothing if not for such things as passive smoking or the fragrance of a man who's just had a smoke. In fact, there's no other way to tell a smoker from the tee-totaling Ron Goody next to him.

There are those who will judge a man because of one choice that he's made, as if he's beyond moral redemption the moment he picks up a cigarette. I don't write this because I just lit one up, although I think you'll hardly see it as anything else. So. I lit one up because I was studying something called "meta-fiction" which I couldn't wrap my head around for various reasons. I lit one up because I was reminded of the hours I spent studying for my engineering papers in Dubai. I lit one up because it brought back conversations that simply couldn't begin around anything else but the act of smoking.

I lit one up because it purified my senses, purged them off anything nostalgic or emotionally cathartic that way. There's nothing sentimental about a cigarette: it's a mechanical process beyond anything else when you fish a crumpled one out of a tight pocket, straighten it out, take a whiff of that tobacco that smells so heavily like chocolate, set one end alight with the Zippo you always had, and take in the first drag.

The first drag, now, you see, is better for the worse cigarette because the smoke is loaded with enough consternation to leave out all pretensions of smoothness. As you reach the middle, the better brands ensure you don't already feel like you're done, as if your throat's just warmed up at the end of the last drag, ready as ever for the next one. That's what makes a cigarette so easy: the mechanical inhalation and exhalation.

Now, there are those who'll tell you they're smoking because it helps with the digestion. No. They're doing it only because a smoke feels really good after a meal. Or early in the morning when you can see the sun rising in the distance beyond all the smog that reminds you that the day that's dawning isn't all that beautiful if not beautifully industrial and capitalistic.

There are others who'll tell you they do it because they find it hard to drop a cigarette and walk away, never to return. No. I've dropped a cigarette and walked away (from heavy smoking). They're doing it only because they don't know it's the mechanical that's holding them back, that it's not the nicotine in their bloodstreams as much as the almost-atheistic walk to the smoking area and reaching into the pack.

And then there are those who won't have a reason. Those are the real ones, who'll admit to the approximately 4-minute long experience being about the jet of smoke blowing out from between their lips and the mental space such an act seems to free up in the middle of a hectic day. More often than not, they've been superficial but blatantly apt reasons.

Now, that's meta-fiction. It's nothing personal.