I’ve smoked well over a hundred thousand cigarettes in my life, and each one of those cigarettes meant something to me. I even enjoyed a few of them. I’ve smoked O.K., great, and terrible cigarettes; I’ve smoked dry and moist, aromatic and almost-sweet cigarettes. I’ve smoked hastily, and other times slowly and with pleasure. I’ve scrounged, stolen, and smuggled cigarettes; I’ve obtained them by devious means, and I’ve begged for them. I once paid thirteen dollars for a pack at a New York airport. I’ve thrown out half-full packs only to fish them back out of the rubbish to render them useless once and for all under the tap. I’ve smoked cold cigarette butts, cigars, cigarillos, bidis, kreteks, spliffs, and straw. I’ve missed flights because of cigarettes and burned holes in trousers and car seats. I’ve singed my eyelashes and eyebrows, fallen asleep while smoking, and dreamt of cigarettes—of relapses and flames and bitter withdrawal. I’ve smoked when it was more than a hundred and ten degrees and when it was ten below. I’ve smoked because I was full and I’ve smoked because I was hungry, because I was glad and because I was depressed. I’ve smoked out of loneliness and out of friendship, out of fear and out of exuberance. Every cigarette that I’ve ever smoked served a purpose—they were a signal, medication, a stimulant, or a sedative, they were a plaything, an accessory, a fetish object, something to help pass the time, a memory aid, a communication tool, or an object of meditation. Sometimes they were all of these things at once. Every cigarette I’ve ever smoked was a good cigarette.

Sometimes I imagine there’s an overlay or a function on Google Maps that would show me all the places I’ve ever smoked: a tiny black flag for every cigarette; or a blue one for every self-rolled Van Nelle that I smuggled over the border into the boarding school; an orange one for the Finas, the flat, ovular, Oriental cigarettes that I have to thank for some of my best literary ideas; and a red one for the filterless Pall Mall cigarettes that I bought before my first flight to America, in the summer of 1982. As the flight attendant handed me the sealed bag for customs, the last doubt was dispelled from my mind that I had managed the passage into adulthood.

I smoked the best cigarette of my life at a lake in a former gravel quarry near the Dünnwald wild-boar park—a flag belongs there, too. I must have just turned eighteen. I hadn’t smoked for a few weeks, maybe owing to a lack of money, and had gone on a two-day art trip to Cologne with my school class. As soon as we got out of the bus in front of the Schnütgen Museum, I ran off and took the tram to my father’s house. My mother’s long-in-the-tooth steel-blue Range Rover stood in the driveway. I slipped into the house, looked in every drawer for the car keys and soon struck it lucky. I started the car and slowly drove in the direction of Leverkusen-Schlebusch, where the stunning Eliana—whom I’d recently fallen in love with—lived with her parents and brother. The coast wasn’t clear at Eliana’s house yet, so about halfway there I turned left onto a narrow sand track and drove through a small patch of woodland until I reached the quarry. I got out and sat on the warm bonnet of the powerful car and pulled a fresh pack out of the pocket of my patched-up suède jacket. I found the lighter and lit my first ever relapse cigarette. I felt how the nicotine shot through my veins after the long abstinence, how it crackled in my brain like a thousand tiny explosions. What I had experienced—this firework—went above and beyond: it overshot all of my estimations. The cigarette at the quarry had a completely new quality. I understood that my attempt at abstinence was a kind of investment that would be paid back five or ten times over.

In the movie “Smoke,” Jim Jarmusch’s character, Bob, visits his friend Auggie (Harvey Keitel) in his tobacco shop to smoke his L.C. with him. “This is it, man,” he says, and fumbles the last Lucky out of the soft pack. “Adios, cigarettos.” Auggie replies, “I am touched that you would want to smoke your last cigarette with me.” Auggie knows how important this moment is in his friend’s life. Or could be—after all, they’re both aware of the statistics. Nevertheless, they take a photo as a souvenir. You never know; maybe it’ll work this time.

Unlike Bob, I have never celebrated the last cigarette. I’ve always smoked them with a conscious disgust, in the knowledge that I’m just giving in to my inner, obviously already overcome weakness. Why should I smoke it? Why should I enjoy it? I’ve already shown how strong I am! If I’m able to renounce a lifetime of any kind of smoking pleasure, every possible cigarette, if I’ve decided this and am sure of it, why not this one, too? Why, when I’ve already come to terms with this resolution long ago, do I open the rubbish bin in the kitchen and retrieve the half-empty packet that I had thrown away a few minutes ago? Why do I go into the street and beg for the last L.C. and—even though it’s the absolute last L.C. of my life—make do with a substandard straight, a straw-dry filter cigarette, a Virginia offset with a glycerine and styrene-acrylic polymer? Why do I even toy with the idea of picking up a cigarette from the cobbled pavement outside my house? This L.C. is perhaps the most important cigarette of my life, the cigarette that I’ll still remember in old age, long after cigarettes have become illegal: I pull it out the bin, I smoke it standing up, I smoke it in haste, unwillingly, and it stinks. I don’t know how many last cigarettes I’ve smoked in my life, but I know that I’ve hated myself a little when smoking all of them.

My only true last cigarette is the only one I actually enjoyed. I didn’t know that it would be my last. Considered this way, it was nothing special; it probably would have been long forgotten if I hadn’t thought about it over and over again, retrospectively. I was sitting with my wife, M., and a friend visiting from Munich in front of our favorite restaurant on a summer’s evening in Berlin, and after a light dinner I tapped the last American Spirit out the pack that I had shared with our friend. Maybe she’d forgotten her cigarettes; I can’t remember. Anyway, I gladly shared it with her. When we’d smoked the pack, the dinner was at an end as a matter of course. It wasn’t necessary to initiate a farewell by referring in some way to all the work we had to do the following day. On the way home, M. said, “I was just about to start again. I felt so left out, I had such a longing afterward to share this pack with the both of you.” “Yes,” I said, “I can understand that. That’s terrible. I’m going to stop. Right now.” M., who must have immediately sensed how serious I was, smiled and nodded and didn’t say a word.