It’s like a breakup, it really is. You know it’s for the best, because the relationship doesn’t make you happy anymore, but as soon as you decide to end things? All you can think about is the good times. How happy it used to make you. That it could make you happy again, maybe, if you got back together. That you wish you had another chance — you’d do things differently.

The nostalgic stories you tell yourself to distract you from the empty space where a boyfriend used to go? You tell the same kinds of stories to hide the spot on your desk where the ashtray used to sit — the ashtray, your Camel Lights, your Bic neatly centered on the pack, the can of compressed air to get the ash out of the keyboard.

I have told myself the same kinds of stories a hundred thousand times in the last six days, how much I miss smoking, how well smoking treated me, how getting back together with smoking would fix everything, how if I don’t get back together with smoking, I can’t go on. The first day, I lay in bed, and on the couch, and on the other couch, and on the floor, and in bed again, and I cried and cried and cried. I cried the whole day. I cried myself to sleep; I cried in my sleep; I woke up, tried to open my eyes, could barely force them ajar because the lids had gotten so puffy from the crying, and started crying again. I ate Tic-Tacs and Altoids and chewed gum, I cut drinking straws in half and “smoked” them, I gnawed on toothpicks and carrots and pens and cuticles, and while I did all these things, I cried. I couldn’t stop crying, and so I cried even harder, drenched with shame.

Nicotine withdrawal, of course, but…lost love, too. Because I love smoking, present tense, and even when it’s all gone to hell, to fall out of love…it takes time. It’s the same way in my splits with men, historically — once it’s done, I don’t remember that he sulked a lot, or had sucky friends, or that his table “manners” looked like the pie-eating-contest part of Stand By Me, because I don’t care to remember those things. Instead I find myself standing over a box of jetsam, ticket stubs and matchbooks, a Polaroid of his butt, the overly generic birthday presents I’d pretended to like, dropping fat lonely tears into the pile as I seal it up because, in his absence, every trait that made him unsuitable (and me miserable) seems now like a cinematic quirk, a charming eccentricity.

Smoking, same thing. The dozens of colds I came down with that a non-smoker wouldn’t have caught, the butts dropped down between the driver’s side door and the seat that necessitated a combo platter of moving violations, the stale-smelling clothes, the many times I drunkenly lit the filter end, the wasted money, the yellow teeth, the lighter callus on my thumb…in less than a week, it’s nearly disappeared, that little bump. I thought it would take longer.

Do I look at the previous paragraph and think to myself, “Good thing I’m shut of all that”? No. No no no, of course not. Remember: it’s a breakup. Reason has no place at this table where I linger, melodramatically, General-Foods-International-Coffees-ily, only on the good bits. I remember these things:

One of a hundred cold early mornings in the city. Grey smells everywhere: soot, exhaust, newsprint. The few people around walk like crabs, hunched down into their coat collars, crunching through the dirty rime at the curb and into the deli. I’m waiting on the Biscuit getting a paper, or I’m waiting on Tel Aviv to send me a car to La Guardia, or I’m waiting on Gen who’s at the Dunkin drive-up window. The street isn’t quite awake, the sun is bleaching the last pink out of the sky, but I’ve got hot deli coffee and a smoke. Nothing like it.

One of a hundred late nights in a dorm room. Slung into a corner of the How Now Brown Couch with a notebook and a rhyming dictionary, ashing into a Big Gulp, staring at my pen, thinking; or lying on my back on the floor at three in the morning, silent, the ends of my hair touching the ends of Ernie’s, the two of us looking at the smoke curling up to the ceiling, the smoke comes from the cigarettes and from the gears grinding in our skulls, self as society in Wharton, the evolution of the epistolary novel, the last match is bad luck.

One of a hundred late nights anywhere. Bedhead, makeup sliding off, the ashtray rising and falling on my belly, or his. Quiet except for the sizzle of the cherry, the pah pah…pah of smoke rings, attempted and abandoned. Silence, satisfaction.

One of a hundred car rides. One of a hundred big meals. One of a hundred hot days, dark nights, cups of coffee, conversations. Sitting and thinking. Sitting and not thinking. Sitting and talking and not talking and sitting.

The windowsill in the pool room: five packs of Camel Lights, each stripped in a different way so we can tell them apart. Why it matters whose pack is whose, I don’t remember, since a pack cost a buck eighty back then, but Slim always forgets that his is the one with the folded foil inside, and McK and I always snap at him for it, always. A hundred times.

Breakups, real ones. Closing the door on him for the last time, his hangdog face and the brown bag of socks and CDs, then turning back to face the apartment, the low-lying fog of smoke at knee level, the not-my-brand butts in the ashtray, squashed carelessly, which always irritated me — just make sure it’s all the way out, it takes two seconds, Jesus. I curled up in a ball on the ground and lay there and let the tears roll up my temples, wallowing; after a while, just to up the pathos, I crawled to the phone to call in the cavalry. Behind my desk, on the floor, my feet up on the wall, the ashtray on my hip, receiver in one hand and Camel in the other, I listened while my friends told me I would live. I didn’t believe them, but they told the truth. It’s for the best, they said. (“I know but.”) It’s past time, they said. (“I know but.”) But nothing, they said. And I didn’t die.

Can I resist the flirty charms of smoking — can I keep my back turned on our long history? I don’t know. I’ve gotten back with exes before; I always think it’ll last, but it never does. And just like in the movies, I’ve ditched the cad for the old friend, the one I’ve known since the beginning, the one who loved me no matter what.

…Cheese.

January 22, 2007

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