Before sunset I always like to go out on my balcony to smoke a cigarette. Tonight is just another night, another night to go on a quick trip through objective memories. I'm not a big believer in emotions anymore. It's been years since I cried, maybe even more years since I had a good, honest laugh. Not the laugh of a stupid joke, but a real laugh, the kind you remember when you're lying on your death bed... or when you're jammed through the windshield of a terminal car wreck. Ever since I started taking the medication... "To relieve you of the burdens of trauma," they told me, I don't remember what happened too well... most if this "trauma" (which they claim to be life-threatening) turned into a tall tale of jaded memories. It's better that way, I guess. It's become so vague that it's pointless to even think about. The first drag of the cigarette is my favorite part. It has some undescribable arroma to it. Before the lighter sends the little ember down the tobacco race track, there's a brief pause. A moment of silence, a tribute to all the other cigarettes you've burned through in the past.... After this peculiar pause, you pull away the lighter and suck up the mix of nicotine, tar, and cancirogenic chemicals. And then you're in. The moment...THE MOMENT. First kiss: You want to forever fall in love with the toxic blend of addiction. You want its aroma to drift through your cavernous nose and never find the exit. You want the smoke to pump ecstacy into your blood stream until the end of time. You want your lungs to never deflate, for them to be a still river of joy that your drag of the cigarette will replenish even during the worst of droughts. An ocean of love in a handheld syringe Exterminated wishes: Before the smoke fully reaches the depths of your lungs, before your heart contracts for another push of vitality, before your eyes have a chance to shift to see the sun's reflection off the gorgeous lake, its over. So instantaneous that its over before it begins. That's the moment. It's the moment upon which I have been relying for several years... for several years of inspiration, hope, and joy. My emotions come alive, for that glimpse of time. But they melt away as fast as a wax figurine in a charcoaled chamber of melted steel. Cataract kills the view. My lighter is out. It only sparks when I attempt to light my second cigarette. Shit luck. I walk back into the house, eyes investigating a kitchen drawer in hopes of finding another one. But then, how odd: A photograph of my parents, at a place I remember so vividly from their stories... a gorgeous haven surrounded by gleaming waterfalls and towering canyons. My dreams of this place are clockwork by now. The sunset especially... I know every detail of that day by heart. But...but... its not me with them; A funny looking black haired boy cut and pasted over my face. Invisible border of incisions that never took place. Puddle of glue dried out with no trace. A photographic plateu of joy leveled...Oh, there's the lighter. I return to the balcony.
Definitely change the opening line. It's boring and I've read the same thing hundreds of times, and seen it in movies, and it makes my skin crawl. Why do people always have to light up cigarettes to show that they're having some kind of big introspective moment? Starting your story with a cigarette being lit up, thrown away, exhaled, inhaled, smelled, watched, anything.... it's so common and so overused. It makes you look really unprofessional, and makes me think the rest of it will be the same way.
Objective memories??? did you just throw the word objective in to show you read it in a dictionary? No memory has an objective meaning As you are writing the work - you therefore have no knowledge of what that laugh is like All the rest just sounds like some wierd advert for Dunhill cigarettes (or is that "dunghill") _______________________________
