All Smoke Kills
Sofia A
I escaped a proxy war in Sudan in 2023.
I was just falling in love and applying to a medical residency in a hospital in Om Durman. In tears and snot, my lover dropped me off at the port and we never saw each other again. I decided to wait for the war to be over so I can fall in love again. I never did and I never fully got over it. How abruptly a life can change. For years, I tried to force myself back into that prescribed sequence; career, marriage, family stability, only to find that global crises do not respect human milestones. And I am several years behind.
In Ramadan 2026, I was offered a fine arts teacher position with stable salary. I was really looking forward to the prospects of having enough money to help me get back to the timeline and save enough to take the USMLE (a licensing exam exclusively for individuals pursuing a medical degree) which costs a kidney and a toe.
Until that first emergency alarm, I could only hear my newfound happiness, that like fragile glass, shattering in my ears. My future once again bleak and uncertain. But this time, there is nowhere to go, and I have a cat without a passport.
Making art felt like a frivolous act, a careless act. Only the privileged could enjoy. I lost my sparkle. I lost my job. I lost my art. And it’s a shame; I was gifted a beautiful set of oil pastels that I have wanted for many months. It felt stupid and pointless to create or try with everything unfortunate happening. So, I sat by the window watching the grey sky and picked up smoking again. It didn’t matter which would hurt me more, the cigarette or the missile.
All smoke kills anyway.
I have given up. My breakthrough occurred unexpectedly in the supermarket. Standing in the hair styling aisle, I realized I had postponed buying a hairdryer for years until I got the ‘job’, waiting for a proper justification or a right time that might never come. Then it suddenly bothered me that I was okay suffering with a cold scalp while my hair airdries for no reason.
How silly it felt to put comfort and happiness on hold until times get good. I bought the damn hair dryer, washed my hair just so I can use it and then drove out to Kite Beach to enjoy the life and breath that still remains inside of me. That mundane purchase set a sense of urgency and fire in me that I have exhausted my oil pastels and acrylics filling out my sketchbook.
In that aisle that day I realised two things. Time waits for no one, and it passes us all by regardless of all the crises. There is no such thing as the right time. And two, having established that there are no right times and things might never improve, what’s the point in postponing the things that make you happy?
The art isn’t a luxury for “after the war”, it’s a survival mechanism. It needs to exist now with fear, uncertainty, feelings of hopelessness, because despite them, there is still a little space for happiness.