image "Guilt in my recovering soul." I like that phrase for this letter. This one haunted me too as I wrote it. I didn't have any one specifically in my mind when I wrote this one, it was just what I imagined as a composite of lonely older people I knew at the time--some of them non-smokers but who I recognized looked so forward to family and friend visits that it just all of a sudden struck me how a smoker in the same situation is likely to have altered priorities. "My Cigarette My Friend" on the other hand was inspired by a specific person I knew who I was visiting in the hospital who thought that she had just experienced her fourth heart attack, was afraid she was dying, and was wanting a cigarette. She had literally been out the night before to a play that she had left some key scenes so she could go out and smoke. That letter almost wrote itself when I went home that evening and just wrote what I thought as I reflected about her comments.
Although I don't want this letter to create a sense of guilt as much as a sense of remorse of how much really valuable time may have been wasted on cigarettes. More importantly now though, I hope this piece creates a sense of importance on how you never want to waste your future valuable time and energy from this point forward on maintaining an active nicotine addiction and remind you that you never will as long as you always remember to never take another puff!
Joel