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Smoke Free, Page Two
Now, a few paragraphs later, it has been ten days, twelve hours, and thirty minutes since I have smoked. I want to write, but I can’t seem to think. My imaginary people and the words I use to tell their stories seem to be locked up in the smoke-free vacuum my mind has become.
Yesterday, I became so upset at work that I didn’t leave the building to go to lunch, fearing I would buy cigarettes instead. My longing to smoke was stronger than it had been since the very beginning—I wanted a whole pack of them. I wanted to sit at a table with my feet in an opposite chair and drink coffee and smoke twenty cigarettes one right after the other.
It is not the first time I’ve wanted to quit my job, but it is the first time I’ve wanted it during every waking moment. I want to stay home where the only other person there is one who loves me. I want to sit in my office and smoke cigarettes and write stories. I want my feelings to not be hurt anymore because I am not valued where I have worked for over twenty years.
I want. Oh, Lord, I want.
I am horrified to think that my concentration, self-confidence, and little bitty store of creativity are all to be found in a pack of Marlboro Lights. Beyond that, I’m frightened that there’s little left of the person I was besides paranoia and a lumberjack’s appetite. There is surely not enough left of me to be a grandmother. I’ll bet Martha is shaking her fist at me.
And now it has been thirteen days. I don’t know how many hours and minutes, although I could figure it up, but it doesn’t seem important anymore.
It has ceased to matter just as smoking itself is losing significance as I go along. At work today, I realized—not for the first time—that I am not defined by my job. I am there for eight hours, I work hard, and then I come home where my life is. It is the same whether I smoke or not. My employers do not have to value me; they only have to pay me.
I am writing, you will notice. I’m sitting at my desk trying to keep this article from getting too long while visions of people I don’t know yet dance in my head like literary sugarplums. Soon, they will begin to tell me their stories and I’ll have the pleasure of writing them down.
My, you’re thinking, she’s come a long way in only a couple of days. Is it like, voila, she doesn’t even want a cigarette?
Nope. I wish it was. But, truth be told, I’d still like to smoke. Sometimes the longing is sharp and sustained and I have to go for a walk or eat two Tootsie Pops in rapid succession or brush my teeth even if it’s only been an hour since last time.
I am not fully convinced that stopping smoking will improve my health, change my life for the better, or make me into a nicer person. I don’t know if it will give me those years the doctor referred to or allow me to see my grandchildren grown up. But I do know it will save a bundle of money, make my house smell better, and make my insurance man happy.
It has forced me to exercise to counteract the additional calories I’m shoving into my system. (Anything I hate as much as exercise must be good for me. Kind of like cooked carrots and calcium capsules the size of over inflated footballs.)
My sleep is strange. I’ve always fallen asleep as soon as I lay down and woke seven hours later or when the alarm clock got insistent. Now I wake several times through the night, though not for long spaces of time, and I have dreams. The other night, I dreamed that one of my favorite singers was cheating on his pretty wife. It was obvious, in the dream, that since he was cheating, my husband was, too. I woke him to find out if he was. He said No and that he’d let me know if he decided to. He suggested I go back to sleep.
And now it has been sixteen days. I am, despite sporadic exercise, three to five pounds heavier than when I started, depending on the time of day and how dressed I am when I weigh myself.
At the end of four weeks, I no longer think about smoking at some of my favorite 'trigger' times: when I get up in the morning, after meals, after sex. Although I do not feel completely out of the nicotine-induced woods, this new freedom from need does make me want to dance, to bake cookies, to burn more candles and Christmas lights.
My husband who never complained about my smoking is thrilled that I have stopped. He buys me gifts for incentive, knowing I’m as partial to presents as the grandkids. He dances with me in the kitchen and eats cookies and hangs more lights on the outside of the house. Wire-and-light reindeer graze in the front yard.
My children are pleased, though I know they wish I’d done it long ago. My daughter-in-law promises to make me a quilt for quitting.
I want that quilt. And I want to dance at my grandchildren’s weddings—or in their kitchens; I’m not picky.
Stopping smoking doesn’t come with guarantees. Getting rid of my ashtrays doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll have those forty-fifty years my doctor talked about. When I look in the mirror, I’m no prettier, no younger, God knows no thinner.
But I woke on the first day of 2002, and I didn’t cough even once. How long has it been since your last one, asks my sister, and I can’t remember for sure. Seven weeks and some.
My family gets together on New Year’s Day. The smokers go outside together, laughing and pushing each other, and I know a moment’s regret that no one invites me to come along. Once again I am merely the youngest sibling, the one to whom no one pays much attention, who sits on the floor if there is a shortage of chairs.
However, regret’s moment is short-lived there in my niece’s smoke-free kitchen. I trade pushes and laughter with my brother who has come back from a heart attack, beaten cancer, and had his ear pierced at the age of sixty-one. He, like his wife and my husband, stopped smoking years ago. Though I was proud of them, I didn’t want to join them. Not really.
But now I have. My grandson walks through, and even though he struggles and says No, no, Nana, I pick him up and dance him around the kitchen. It has been eight weeks.
I don’t want a cigarette.
Married for thirty-some years to Duane, her own personal hero, and mother of three and grandmother of six, Liz Flaherty has written a column from her Window Over the Sink off and on for over ten years. She hopes you enjoy her essays. You can email her at lflaherty@comteck.com
