mood: fidgety
last night's sleep rating: C

Sitting at my desk, playing with a rubber band. I'm about to get up and find something to do when I hear the email chime. I go to my inbox and find a message from Innards or whatever the hell that journal's called: they've finally accepted my article on the termite kid. I smile a little and lean back in the chair. It's still a good feeling when something's going to be published. But my satisfaction is brief, I feel like something's missing -- and then I realize what.

Came across this a while ago when I was doing a little random surfing: My Smoking Days

The more I quit, the more I learned about how important cigarettes had become to me. I began to notice, for instance ...that the feeling of absence was strongest at particular moments of the day. My morning coffee just wasn't the same without my morning cigarette and, as time passed, I drank ever less of the stuff. Lunch and dinner were less fulfilling when they weren't concluded with a smoke. And the act of going to bed seemed somehow less definite when it wasn't preceded by one final cigarette. Similarly with my emotional life. When I was smoking, moments of enthusiasm, disappointment, expectation and sadness were all marked by lighting up. With a cigarette, the enthusiasm seemed all the greater, the disappointment less bitter, the expectation richer and the sadness less insuperable. Without one, I couldn't be sure that I was feeling these things at all. Even my sense of beauty was impaired by quitting.

God, can I relate. I quit cigarettes for good after the infarction. Part of it was rational -- cigarettes only made it more likely that I'd get another clot -- but most of it was just circumstances. I couldn't go out to buy any cigarettes, and I couldn't make it to the roof or the loading dock to bum a smoke. The morphine and the delirium had carried me over the worst of the nicotine withdrawal, and as for the habit part, I was out of my normal routine for weeks, living at the beck and call of nurses and therapists of every species. The fifteen minutes after morning rounds, the twenty minutes between lunch and M&M or Grand Rounds, the fifteen minutes before afternoon report.... all those little breaks in the day disappeared in the monotony of rehab.

It's been years, but I still miss it now and then. It comes up at odd times.

Like now. It's mid-morning, a natural pause point, and I've just had a little good news. What could be more natural than getting a coffee and heading down to the smokers' end of the courtyard?

And then I wince a little. Nine years ago, that's exactly what I would have done. But first I would have sent a lewd page to Stacey. If she was able to get away, she'd catch up with me down in the courtyard. "Gre-eg," she'd say, in that little admonishing drawl. What she meant, of course, was I still want you to quit. And I'd just lift my eyebrows, which meant But it's so sexy when you nag. Stacey fussing, me blowing her off: the whole argument compressed in one word and one gesture. Quite a time savings there. We used to be so good together. Even when she was mad at me... I'd slip up to the roof to have a smoke as I contemplated my sins. And of course she'd always find me.

And now Stacey is back. Smoking in the courtyard's not allowed any more, though, and neither are those quiet, intimate morning reunions. These days I'm usually trying to avoid her, but I've lost the roof option, too. It's such a hassle, and I don't smoke like that any more anyway, and if I still did she wouldn't care. She'd probably even encourage it ("as long as I'm standing upwind," she'd add.) She'd always find me, but now I'm trying to hide from her for real, and there's no place to go.

I look down at my hands, at the rubber band wound around my fingers. It's not the cigarette I'm missing. It's all the times I used to smoke -- all the little ups and downs I took for granted.


It's moments like this that I know I will never stop missing my old life.


It's moments like this that I know I will never stop missing Stacey.