The Second To Last Cigarette

What is the point of a second to last cigarette? It has no iconography; no special relationship with the condemned man and his final request; no smoker wondered when their second last would be. The second last cigarette fails to be first or last: it is a non-cigarette; something that you never look forward to with hope or fear or excitement or intrepid fascination. No-one cheered on the second to last guy. Who was one better than Eddy “the Eagle” Edwards in Calgary 1988? Who came second last when Equatorial Guinea’s Eric Moussambani swam to fame in the 2000 Sydney Olympics? Who knows.

Last is great.

• The last time we met…
• The last train home…
• We meet at last!
• This is the last time I have to do this
• I smoked my last cigarette 12 years ago
• Last by no means least…
• I wouldn’t sleep with you if you were the last man on Earth.

We have a special relationship with last. It’s one end of our
chronological pieces of string. Last makes that piece of string
measurable.

Second tells us nothing. It is so pointless it couldn’t even come last.
It failed that much that it failed to fail completely. It’s an exercise
in the abject, unfunny, unremarkable, space-filling, non-news,
insignificant, non-entity world of nothing-in-particular-ness.

As you can probably guess, I’ve stopped smoking. Well, not yet.
There’s the final cigarette, which is reserved for any firing line I
may face (and, indeed, when else will the concerns of health, money,
freedom, choice and not setting a bad example for the kids ever be so
completely countered than when facing the firing squad?) And before
that last fix one must inevitably have the penultimate cigarette, for
surely each ultimate (note how our last cigarette is our “ultimate”
cigarette – further proof (if needs be) that last is better than second
last) is preceded by such.

So there are two cigarettes left in my
smoking narrative but, to be frank, one of them I have no compelling
reason to light. The other will have to wait until such time as I do.