A midnight smoker

After a flirtation that had been going on for months, coy, yearning, increasingly seductive, I had a full blown affair last week. Cigarettes. DuMaurier Special Mild Regular, to be precise.

I'm really not sure what this was about, still. I quit smoking before I turned 30. Kept the flirtation confined to Truly Rare Social Occasions for a decade -- a smoke or two when I was hanging out with Gillian on Festive Occasions, a fitting accessory for a party that had me clad in a corset and unleashed inhibitions. Filching one from a stranger on the very rare occasion where, drink or coffee in hand, it seemed the right punctuation. Part of the debauched Prides over a few years where the drinking started at brunch after our 5K run and didn't end until a rain-soaked, weaving bike ride home at 3:30 a.m. Maybe five a year, and those carefully counted out, felt toxic in my blood the next morning.

The allure of running away with it was always there -- the first always made me crave a second, which I usually had, and then stopped. I'd regret it in the morning, cough my way through a run, feel my lungs like reproachful bellows. But always, I saw myself as a non-smoker, saw the rare cigarettes as acts I committed in particular contexts, out of my "real" self.

Through my divorce, I held to the usual pattern -- had one free for all night that involved about five cigarettes and a lot of damp emotional squalor when I was with L&G at the first event that A was at separately, but otherwise, no craving at all. But then. I moved here. The gritty market, the place where the edges are more open and gaping than anywhere else, random life. And the streets -- the dingy, dirty little streets -- just ached for late night walking, butt in hand.

I noted the pull -- every. single. day. I wanted to smoke. It wasn't seeing other people smoking, it was more about a sensation of wanting the single thing I'd always truly loved about smoking -- walking, alone, in the dark, cool air outside, cigarette sparked in unison to thinking. My late adolescent yearnings in poetry and autumn and movement as I walked the streets of my muted suburb, the grimier, frowsier streets of my first solo apartment in Windsor, the tussle of love tangled, becoming self, blown and breathed through the walking and smoking. Brooding looking at the river before I flicked cigarette into the water. Smokes secretly shared with my dad over dinner, long after he'd quit.

Somehow, that 20 year old Cateself kept pounding at the door of the 41 year old LoftCate and smoking seemed to be the main medium. I held it at bay until one night I smoked some pot with D, and my defenses to the whole idea were down, and I dragged her with me to buy a pack, asked her to sit with me while I smoked one, then two, in my courtyard. It was still a little too cold out to sit outside -- but that's the perfect moment.

The next morning, I handed off the pack ($8!!! btw!) to a ravaged guy in front of the liquor store ("part of your cunning plan to secretly kill the homeless?" Ted asked me). Put aside the thoughts of smoking. Went to Portland, to Vancouver... then asked Katie for one of hers. Just one. Came home. Pride. Filched a couple more, standing on the street in femme garb, in a beer garden. Found myself a couple of weeks later buying a pack after a wine-sodden night with S. Smoked two, put the pack in the freezer. Unfroze it and gave it away. And then another pack, same process, only this time, the freezer became more of a "keep them here until I want another one" zone.

And last week... full blown immersion. Walking in the dark, pondering, wondering. Sneaking down to the lake after dinner with SB to look at the dark water and think and smoke. In my flat, at the kitchen counter, wine in hand, cautious strangled hope in my throat, while talking to F on the phone. Some kind of inverted desire to breathe in a new way.

Every day for four days, I smoked a little. Not a *full* pack over the week, but close. And already could feel my lungs tighter when I was running, could see myself strategizing -- "hey, Matt will be at that party, HE has smokes, maybe I can cadge one from him." Could look forward to another one.

Well. This clearly just would not do. I needed to rewrite that script and pronto. I am not going to fall into that abyss out of some crazy image I have of myself as some brooding post-adolescent romantic. It hasn't escaped me that in most of the truly alluring photos of my young dad, he's got a smoke in hand -- but living fully, by definition, means breathing full oxygen, not sucking the air out of your own skin, wrinkling up like the post-40 coworkers who scared me into quitting in the first place more than a decade ago.

So. I packed it in. Threw out the rest of the freezer pack. Find myself weirdly, unexpectedly, breaking up with cigarettes again, pushing aside the "one more time won't matter" voices, reminding myself I've written them completely out of my story for so long that they can't nudge their way back in.

But. The allure of just one. So fucking tantalizing.