Love and Cigarettes

Being in love is a lot like being addicted to cigarettes.
They tell you not to do it. They tell you that it is harmful.
But those warnings only act to fuel your curiosity.

You contemplate about it for weeks, perhaps months.
Eventually you give in and take your first real puff...inhale...and breath out...
You feel your body go numb and your fingers start to tingle.

You begin to wonder how you lived your life thus far without knowing these sensations.
It's like your first real kiss. You never forget it.

It is the first thing you think about in the morning and the last thing you think about at night.

But you know that those feelings of pleasure come with consequences. So you tell yourself, I can be different. I can control it. But you never say to yourself: no more.

Years pass and you are still smoking. The intense pleasure you first felt is now long gone. You feel more discomfort than pleasure, but you still cannot really tell yourself no more. You are addicted.

So again you come to act on your thoughts and half tell yourself no more for the 15th time.

You go a day, two days, perhaps three days, and you begin to feel a deep hollow emptiness in your life.

It's painful and it consumes almost every single second of your day. The pain is too much to bear so you run back to the thing that caused you so much pain and take it back into your life. Lying to yourself, and making up reasons for why you love it.

You spend the rest of your life in this constant turmoil, but at a certain point you have come to realize that life without this turmoil is worse than it is with it so you live on.

You're at your death bed, and the object of your passion has taken a tremendous hit on your life.
And you can only think to yourself. Is it better to have loved and lost? or never to have loved at all?