The Fall of One Matthias Bernard

2. - Nicotine Saints (Age 16) *1986*

I learned to love cigarettes the way some people learned to pray—slowly at first, then all at once, until the ritual became indistinguishable from survival.

The first pack didn’t feel like a decision. It felt like a coincidence. A friend at school, a shrug, a crumpled dollar bill slid beneath a counter that smelled of dust, sugar, and stale magazines. The cigarettes were warm when I tucked them into my jacket, as if they had been waiting for me. That should have been the warning. I didn’t recognize it as one.

I told myself I liked the control of it. The way fire answered to my thumb. The way smoke obeyed my lungs—entered, lingered, then left me lighter for a moment. It was a small power, almost laughable, but it was mine. In a house where everything else was measured—tone of voice, posture at the dinner table, the correct amount of silence—this was a rebellion that fit neatly in my pocket.

Jennifer noticed immediately.

She always did.

“You smell like an ashtray,” she said one morning, not looking up from the sink. The word ashtray landed like an accusation, a moral failure compressed into six syllables.

I shrugged, already rehearsing indifference. “Probably from school.”

She turned then, hands wet, eyes sharp. “Don’t lie to me.”

I learned something in that moment—not about smoking, but about memory. About how quickly a lie could fossilize into truth if it was repeated often enough. By the end of the week, even I believed the smell followed me home on its own, clinging to me like something unavoidable.

I smoked behind the gym at first, then beneath Halton Bridge, where the concrete held decades of names scratched by people who had needed proof they existed. I added my own once, carving M.B. into a pillar with a pocketknife I later forgot I owned. The smoke curled upward and vanished into traffic noise, and for a brief second I felt absolved.

That second became the problem.

Addiction didn’t arrive like a wave. It arrived like erosion—quiet, constant, unnoticed until the ground gave way beneath me. One cigarette after school. Two at night. One more because the night felt unfinished. I woke with a dry mouth and a faint ache behind my eyes and told myself it was stress. Adolescence. Anything but what it was.

By the time I admitted I needed it, the admission felt redundant.

Every day came with its own regret, neatly packaged. I regretted the smell that clung to my clothes no matter how long I brushed my teeth. I regretted the way my chest felt tighter in the mornings, as if something had been left behind overnight. I regretted the coins missing from my pockets, the lies stacking up like unsent letters.

Most of all, I regretted how normal it had become.

I tried to quit the first time at sixteen. I threw the pack into a trash can outside a convenience store and walked home feeling virtuous and hollow. That night, I dreamed of smoke filling my lungs until I woke gasping, hands shaking. By morning, I was back at the counter, eyes down, voice steady.

Jennifer found the lighter in my jeans that afternoon.

There was shouting. There were rules. There were threats that sounded heavier than they were. My father stayed silent in the doorway, already tired of the argument before it ended. I stared at the carpet and felt something settle in my chest—not shame, exactly, but a resignation that would follow me for years.

I kept smoking.

Philadelphia kept me company. The city never judged; it only absorbed. Smoke blended with exhaust. Regret blended with routine. I walked streets I had known all my life, convinced they were changing when it was only me. My parents never moved, and neither did the feeling that I was stuck inside a version of myself I didn’t recognize anymore.

In 1986, the habit hardened.

That was the year cigarettes stopped being a choice entirely. They became punctuation—ending sentences, beginning thoughts. I smoked when I was anxious, when I was bored, when I was happy enough to feel suspicious of it. I smoked alone, which felt honest, and with others, which felt performative. Each cigarette promised relief and delivered repetition.

Sometimes I imagined my lungs keeping score.

At night, I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, the lava lamp humming softly beside me, and counted how many I had smoked that day. The number was never low enough to comfort me, never high enough to shock me into stopping. It hovered in that cruel middle space where habits thrive.

I thought about the future in fragments. Twenty years. Thirty. The idea of myself older felt abstract, like a character written by someone else. Still, a quiet fear crept in—the idea that my body was remembering something my mind refused to catalog. That each breath was a negotiation I would eventually lose.

Once, after burning my finger and crying out my mother’s name, I stood in the bathroom and stared at the blister forming beneath the skin. I wondered if this was how it started—small damage, easily dismissed, quietly cumulative.

I rinsed my hand under cold water and lit another cigarette with the other.

Regret followed me like a shadow that grew longer with age. It was there when I brushed my teeth raw. There when I washed my clothes twice and still smelled smoke. There when I avoided mirrors because my eyes looked duller, heavier, as if something inside them had gone stale.

Yet every morning, I reached for the pack.

Addiction taught me a terrible intimacy—the way self-destruction could masquerade as comfort. The way repetition could feel safer than change. The way a bad choice, made often enough, stopped feeling like a choice at all.

By the end of the year, I understood something I would never quite forgive myself for: I wasn’t smoking to rebel anymore.

I was smoking to forget.

And forgetting, I would later learn, was far more dangerous than remembering ever could be.

When you’re ready, I’ll move straight into Chapter Three—prom, 1987, Puttin’ on the Ritz, Anna, and the first time forgetting collides with performance instead of solitude.