allow me to make this childlike in nature

someone once told me “cigarettes taste good. but only sometimes. only when there’s tragedy or love. but especially both. because that’s when you want to be hurt, for every kind of reason, and nothing can taste better than cigarettes when it’s like that. they remind me why i’m alive.” 

being a person i hold very dearly, i never thought to question what was said. but today i realized that there is never a time when tragedy and love are not present. nor are they two emotions separate from one another. where there is tragedy, there is love. where there is love, there is tragedy. one cannot experience one without the other, in their truest forms that is. how can one say they know love, without having known tragedy? how can one experience tragedy at a hand other than that of loves? love without tragedy is not love. 

everything in this world can be divided into those two things, tragedy and love. not only that, but they give meaning to one another, as nothing can exist in itself. is it not reasonable that we should always want to hurt? recently i have found myself enjoying my sadness. to recognize and relish sorrow is something that not many people find any sense in. but sorrow makes us human, just as much as joy does, just as much as love does, reminds us that we are alive, just as death does. 

we want to feel pain when we are happy, so that we can know that our happiness is real. if joy can exist simultaneously with pain, the pain gives that joy so much more meaning. and when we feel sorrow, the pain reminds us that it too shall pass.

Hurt and Pain are a means by which we measure everything we experience. when we taste cigarettes, we taste pain. we remind ourselves that we are alive, and that we FEEL. not only the good, but the bad. the moment we stop feeling either is the moment we lose ourselves. to be numb to joy, to be numb to sorrow, to be numb to any feeling on the spectrum of human emotions, is to not live. 

so i leave you with this: enjoy your pain, find joy in your sorrows. but when you are happy, remember that it is BECAUSE you have experienced pain and anguish that you are able to feel joy.

smoke cigarettes.