Post Smoker Walk, in Today

 

The smoke today sits like a punishment from old habits — twenty‑five years of cigarettes rising back up in the air around me, thick enough to taste. The dog and I walked through it anyway, her tail cutting through the haze while my lungs reminded me of every year I spent ignoring them. Windows left open, the house filled with that dull grey heaviness, the kind that numbs the tongue and steals words right out of your mouth. Tetley and coffee couldn’t cut through it. The world felt blurred, like someone smeared pastels over the edges of the day. I kept moving, one nod, one grin from a stranger, just enough to say I’m still here in all this smoke. Mama was right — this new world feels like a second layer of reality, a post‑information haze, climate change turning the air into something you walk through instead of breathe. And still, the dog needed her walk, and I went.