Source

Smoke drifts into my room no matter how I hold the cigarette so I take big drags to hurry it up. I’ve been smoking since I was fifteen and I still hate the smell. If I could only send the wind back to where it came from. But the world isn’t as pliable as fiction.
There are kids playing soccer in the street. They scream at each other in Spanish, pushing and grappling to get to the ball.
Suppose I were able to change the wind’s course, send it westward with some grand performative statement. Suppose I made it a sourceless myth, vague and tractable, and forgot that a breeze in Harlem could be a gale in Greenland, a storm in Fiji. Cloud formations, oceanic ebb, and precipitation around the world would be thrown off, all to reroute a little cigarette smoke. And the people... What would happen to the vintner pruning his syrah vines in Chile, levee builders sharing a smoke in Louisiana, the Austrian couple squabbling in a paddleboat on Lake Neusiedl, the young kiterunner cutting arabesques in the Orlando sky, surfers riding waves off the Cornwall coast, the hotelier rebuilding cocktail huts in Phuket? Who would warn the fishermen on the Mediterranean, in mid April, of the snowstorm headed straight for their dinghy? I’d be playing God. I’d be scourging reality with my fictions—a selfish heresy.
I need to quit.