This is the story of a man named Felix, who is a 24-year-old law student. On most days he spends his mornings on his balcony, letting himself feel the soft heat waves of the sunrise. In this particular spot, Felix has his own routine, and because he is a person with stress levels higher than the Burj Khalifa building, this routine consists of drinking his coffee along with smoking cigarettes. Plain and simple.
Firstly, he reaches for his phone, wanting to read some articles. He comes across an article that says that a smoker has a 25 years shorter life span, than an individual that doesn’t smoke. He closes his phone, feeling anxious about what he has read. Come to think of it, this feeling is pretty normal, given the fact that he, himself, is a smoker. He tries to brush this thought off and reaches for his pack and lighter, to enjoy his little morning routine. He looks at his now lit cigarette, thinking again about the article. He thought that it can’t be true, that it must be a piece of information that hasn’t been thoroughly checked before being published.
Therefore, thinking obsessively about the piece of a publication that he has read, he started to inhale the smoke from the cigar. As soon as the smoke hit his lungs he got a strange feeling, like some sort of goosebumps. “This is strange”, Felix thought to himself. He also tries to explain what he is feeling by thinking that he needs a few seconds to adapt to the chemicals in the smoke because it was too early in the morning.
But any logical explanation is ruled out when before his eyes appear a cloud of fog with moving mages portrayed on it. Felix starts to panic and tries to touch the cloud, ut it looked more like something that his mind is projecting into the 3D dimension. He continues smoking, observing the fact that the more he smokes the more vivid the images become. The weird thing about smoking cigarettes making your life shorter is that it brings you closer to your future.
Now the cloud is showing a picture of Felix on his graduation day when he receives his diploma at the ceremony. He thought that this was a memory of his from when he finished high school, but the more he looks at the picture the more anxious he becomes. At the ceremony, in the back of the picture, there was a picture that said “Congratulation, class of 2023”. The moment when Felix sees this on his balcony is 11 March 2022, so it was impossible, in his mind, that he could see something that hasn’t taken place yet.
He tries to analyze every detail of the portrayed image but the cloud dissipates. He looks at his hand. His cigarette was put out. He takes another, lights it up, and smokes again. The cloud appears again in front of him, showing another picture. This time Felix was eager to find where would he be and if the cloud is showing him the future or the past.
By the time the colors were vivid, he was already smoking half of his cigarette. He could see himself in his own law firm, being a senior partner. He was thinking that this must be a thing that his brain had created, given the fact that Felix dreamed of becoming a senior partner since he has started college.
The cloud dissipates again, and it didn’t have the time to disappear completely that another image appeared, which means that Felix is smoking another cigarette. This time he was seeing himself in a house with his, what it seems, wife and a daughter in his arms. He looked at least 10 years older. He took another cigar and another, as the curiosity of what will his future looked like, is getting the best of him.
Felix reached his 60’s when he and his wife were living in a cottage near the forest relaxing on the patio, getting a visit from time to time from their daughter. Felix could see in this image that the 60 years old he was happy right there.
The cloud dissipates again. Felix looks at his watch. It is 9:30. He needs to go brush his teeth and then he has to go to classes. As he walks to the bathroom he thinks to himself that he must be one lucky person for having the opportunity to see his future. He was happy, and as he realized that he was happy, he associates that perhaps the feeling of happiness was induced because of the vision that he had not because of nicotine.
He reaches for the doorknob and opens the door. He looks in the mirror. As soon as Felix looked at himself in the mirror his heart dropped. He looked old, he had wrinkles on his face and his hands, he thought that he must have been dreaming. But it was real. He aged in 2 hours, more than 20 years. He looked more like the 6o years old Felix than the 24 years old one. And he knew that the life he saw was moving past him because of the event that caused him to have his picture painted in front of him.
