I was suffering through a terrible depressive episode when a friend advised me to go outside and get some fresh air.
"I will," I told her. "I need a cigarette."
She laughed so hard she probably had something coming out of every orifice except maybe her ears. For a day, I was famous with people I'd never met as the conversation made the rounds of her family and neighbors.
But cigarettes are best when I'm on edge. On the edge or after a good cry, a cigarette is divine. It stings a little, giving me that lift into my body. It stops the tears. It gives me rational time to think about what I'd just been through.
I've been a food addict since I was four years old. Anyone who suffers from addiction understands how emotional growth stops or slows down at the age the addiction kicks in. There are numerous ways in which I struggle with being about 16-years-old in my 60s, but one of them is that it can take days to find the words for what I'm feeling. Is it anger or hatred? Anger or self-loathing? Sometimes going out for a smoke gives me the neutral space to inch toward what the icky feeling/s I'm having really is/are.
The best cigarette of all, of course, is after I haven't had one for nearly 24 hours. One of the ways I avoid living is through marathon sleeping. I can sleep like a bear sometimes. And then…there is the high. My head floats away from my body; I need to sit down because my bones have turned to rubber; the sounds of traffic and people at the bus stop beyond my hedge recede. I close my eyes and feel my body sinking into the chair and my head bobbing among the tree branches.
It lasts about two minutes if I'm lucky.
Montana has pretty much skipped autumn and swung into winter. I was driving into the grocery store parking lot yesterday and saw a guy vaping. In the cold, the vapor enveloped his head like he had his own personal fog.
Purrr-fect, I thought. Invisibility. I want it. Not enough to vape, but it was an insight into how smoking places a distance between me and circumstances.
Take Thanksgiving or Christmas or any other time the family gathers together. There will be a moment when I climb over bodies to get out to the deck for a smoke and a drink. The family quirks — half of them doing things on their phones, the other half commenting on what's going on with the phone stuff — drive me half-mad and I need to get away, get invisible. I don't care how cold it is, just let me out and I'll survive it while you pass your memes and jokes and videos around the living room.
I love it that I have to smoke outside. My apartment complex won't let us smoke within 10 feet of the buildings, which is even better. I take my hot or cold drink up to the flower plot where my dog can't reach me and I'm that much further away from what's waiting for me to do inside. I care less about the weather because outside is where I can escape my life.
Or insert a paragraph into my life. I finish a project and I want to get out to my car with said-drink and cigarette to think about the next paragraph, the next platform of work or activity to be done.
Smoking can be the introvert's way out. If I say I'm going out for some fresh air, people might wonder why when it's neither hot nor stuffy in the house. But when I say I'm going out for a smoke, no one asks questions. And if someone else says she'll join me, it's a delicious sudden intimacy, this forbidden act we have in common.
Distance — from work, people, emotion, the difficult conversation I'm having on the telephone — all neatly pre-rolled in parchment-like paper. The occasional joint moment, serendipity dropped my way. And a 16-year-old's feeling of being a Bad Girl, with a cigarette drowsing from the side of my mouth as I proclaim something in ways that would make a sailor run home to his mama.
Sunglasses and a cigarette. More hiding, more rebelling.
I picked up my week's supply of three packs yesterday at the gas station. I had my first good feeling about a Christmas I'm not looking forward to when I saw the ho-ho-ho lighters. I've never seen these before. I bought one on the spot.
I'll need it badly in the months to come.