I smoke. I am a smoker. On more than one occasion, I have been known to lift a cigarette to my lips and set the end of it alight, setting off a chain reaction of events that placate and elevate certain synapses within my brain while soundly and certainly destroying other delicate tissues within my body. The knowledge of this slow and willful series of assaults that I commit against myself will, in turn, churn up a murky cocktail of guilt and panic and rounded out by a splash of smug defiance- always, always, always leading to the next cigarette.
Somewhat fortunately, this exquisite ballet of elation and self-loathing is one that I perform only in the company of some sort of adult beverage and, more rarely, in the throes of acute personal crises. I've been able to escape the kind of steady, rhythmic brand of tobacco dependency that leads to the yellowing of teeth and fingertips, the spidery wrinkling of the upper lip, the gasping, sputtering laughing/hacking of the afflicted. I’m also too fat to be wrinkled; possessing enough face flesh to resist the collapsing chasms of collagen that benignly announce the erosion of our personal space and time in tandem.
Recently, I had another one of my many half-assed personal epiphanies: deprive myself of a comfortable smoking environment and the smoking will cease. Surely, anyone who wrestles with such an innocent two-pack-a-week habit could just walk away and forget it ever existed in the first place especially when confronted with the absence of a chair in which to sit or a tray in which to ash. The thousands of minutes spent smoking over the last eighteen years would simply disappear, like Michael J. Fox in that photograph in Back to the Future before his parents kiss, the aspects of my existence that had been harmed by my own behavior healing themselves and hidden by a new skin like that of a baby. Undetectable, nonexistent. I would then be free to move forward in life unabashed, unencumbered by addiction, and compelled to take up parasailing or community activism or some other shit.
As always, in my planning based on the timeless principles of magical thinking, I failed to take into account that these measures would not address the desire to smoke.
“I’m pretty sure that it’s possible to smoke while sitting on a stair or while standing”, said my husband when I ran my latest revelation by him. He was insightful and succinct as ever, being six years deep in the unenviable and unwinnable role of sounding board to my repeating visions of self-improvement. “ I think that instead of moving furniture around we should be thinking of moving some stuff-around-in-there”, punctuating his last four words with gentle taps to my forehead. God, I love him. Not only because he’s right and honest and true, but his hard-earned lack of faith allows me to continue my charade in exactly the pattern of person failure to which I have become accustomed. A warm blanket, he is. Are we dysfunctional? Maybe.
When did it begin, this need of mine to smoke cigarettes? To tempt fate by making it as likely as possible that my worst fears of early death will be realized? I was nineteen. I was bored. I was nineteen. What else is there to say? Why does it even matter? I’m staring at thirty-eight now. I never thought I’d live this long. Will I see fifty-eight? Sixty-eight? No one knows. No one. So I plod along, and will continue to do so while trying to take delight in every tumor-free birthday that passes. The Zoloft has mitigated the panic that comes with defecating on my wonder-filled life with every lit cigarette. And I will continue to live the best way I know how until my frenetic fear of death and disease becomes the kind of stoic resignation found on the visages of the old. We all have to die somehow.
Maybe I’ll get hit by a bus or an asteroid. Did you ever think of that? Did you?
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