The Rain.

The rain lashes down with the cruelty of a world that has sunk its teeth into my dreams. My fingers tremble as I open the matchbox, the cardboard box wet and soft as old sorrow. The fire refuses to cooperate, it resists, as if it understands that each flame swallows a piece of my soul.

I scrape the match against the box, but it breaks like a promise that never came true. Another try. The rain laughs at me as I desperately try. Each spark that lights and immediately goes out is an ode to my persistence, a macabre dance of light and water. The pleasure is not in the ease, but in the fight—the fight against the elements, against my own desire that chases me like a dog.

When a flame finally lingers, I feel something sacred. It is not a victory, but a temporary truce with the universe. The flame shivers like a dying candle, and I hold my hand around it like a mother shielding her child from the cold. The smoke slowly sucks up into the air, thick and heavy with meaning. I draw it in with the intensity of someone trying to save themselves from destruction.

The wind plays with the cigarette, tugs at the paper, bites the glowing tip. But I suck even deeper, as if I can steal something meaningful from this moment of suffocating beauty. Each drag is a victory, not over the rain or the wind, but over the futility of it all. The fire is not just a tool – it is a ritual of self-mortification and triumph, of survival against all odds.

The rain is getting heavier, the wind howls through the streets like an angry choir angel. My matches are gone, but the cigarette still burns, heroic as a star in a pitch-black sky. The pleasure is not in the smoking itself – that is only the fruit of the labor. The pleasure is in the lighting, in the infinite patience, in braving the weather and wind as if the world wants to break me and yet I remain standing.

And when the cigarette finally burns, when the smoke kisses my lips, I know that for a moment I have been the master of the smallest fire in the biggest storm. That is all that matters. A cloud of smoke like a triumph in the rain.