Prologue

I started smoking cigarettes shortly before entering college, and started to inhale the smoke in earnest shortly after my best friend killed himself towards the end of sophomore year.
Such is my history of dalliances with tobacco.
When I was growing up my grandparents smoked, or at least my grandmother did. I remember once drawing a series of crude No Smoking signs and posting it all over their apartment. Why? Because I had just got through my anti-smoking program at elementary school and I was on some kind of self-righteous kick.
But what does this have to do with me now? I can’t even remember who was smoking when I drew those signs. Come to think of it, the whole thing might have been my sister’s idea.
The point is I never really had strong feelings regarding the who smoking thing. It was something people did which didn’t affect me at all. I never found the smell offensive. I never found the smoke getting in my eyes.
So I began in a small diner one day while visiting my friend John. Parliament Lights. Double T Diner. But I never inhaled, as odd as that is.
I drew into my mouth and held, blowing out small streams of pale-blue smoke and watching the whole mass drift upwards into the heavens. I enjoyed the repetitive motions of smoking. The occupation of the hand holding the cigarette, the metered, measured breaths. Perhaps my love of the past and the image of outsider intellectuals smoking cigarettes and discussing their ideals had something to do with it.
Also it pissed people off. It baffled them and drew them into a state of almost extreme displeasure. The simple act of smoking a cigarette gave me such extreme state of satisfaction that I couldn’t help but light up in front of strangers to see what would happen.
Then my friend died and suddenly I was drawing the smoke into my lungs. You could analyze this and say that maybe I had a death wish; maybe I too wanted to taste death.
Truthfully though? I didn’t have a fake ID to buy booze and I thought the nicotine buzz would be good enough.
Such was the infancy of my chemical addiction, made all the easier by my physical habit.
The two complimentary ideals fed off one another so that I went from maybe a pack a month of non-inhaled status symbols to a 3 pack a week habit of small paper-and-leaf crutches.
So why quit? I am young. I lead a fairly simple, sedentary lifestyle that cigarettes in no way impede. Why end my love affair with smoking?
The reasons break down thusly. Health, girlfriend, money, and maybe a desire to cast off my addiction so I could be truly free. Though I am not going to stop drinking, so explain that one.
The point is that after months of promising I would quit for various reasons, waiting for certain checkpoints to be cleared, I finally decided tonight that I would quit.
I went on a run that didn’t last too long. I used to be able to keep up a steady pace for a long time. This time I broke down, my lungs clenching. For half an hour after my lungs seemed to seize up. Like a soaked, pliable sponge rapidly drying into rigidity. After I overcame the coughing fits I stepped out onto my balcony and smoked my final cigarette. That didn’t go smoothly, obviously. But it was the last in the pack and I needed closure.
So here I am. Every time I feel like I need a cigarette I plan on writing about it, setting it down and thinking it over so that I might reign in my cravings, actualize my need, and destroy my addiction once and for all.