I Don't Smoke

" I DON'T SMOKE"

There is a dichotomous lingering effect that accompanies giving up smoking. There is a swinging anxiety and shifting feeling for social experience which makes the physicality of quitting seem like such a dream. The cravings which begin as mental twangs and body shivers eventually leave; the lungs clean out and your energy can bounce around 100% more than when you were a"smoker" and you don't wake up with that dirty ashy breathe which lodges in the back of your phlegm filled throat. You can hear your body rejoicing, singing "thank you, thank you, thank you!"

The grateful, abounding joy of your body soon dwindles when you find yourself in a social situation.

You find yourself talking to a pretty boy (or pretty girl) in a group of many and suddenly one announces they are going out for a smoke [ok] and then just as suddenly your pretty boy (or girl) decides to join [ok..] and then suddenly everyone peels away and leaves you abandoned, surrounded by empty cushions on a horizon of empty floorboards [NOT OK!!] You want so badly to respond in the once natural and greatly familiar way and trail after them, armed with tobacco to roll, filters, papers and ready to ask to borrow your new friend's lighter (how many friends I have made this way I cannot count!) But you chose health. Unfortunately in a blindly disgusting, hipster, indie Sydney scene which I often find myself in, everybody smokes. I chose health, and often that choice means dealing with new forms of abandonment from my prior smoking crew, my lover, isolation from potential friends and some intense nostalgia from the loss of some really comforting habits like sharing a smoke with someone with limited time before the bus, smoking in the bath whilst reading a good book, trading tobacco for a filter or paper, liking the taste of kissing a co-smoker, coffee and cigarettes altogether and that one last smoke to get you to bed.

I guess it's a real form of grief. It would be easier if no-one else in the universe smoked, if all my favourite movies weren't riddled with the habit (I used to love Jim Jarmusch for his smoking references now I find it hard watching him without one in my hand), if my housemates didn't smoke all around me inside the house and if in social situations I wasn't left, a "non- smoker" on the inside of that wall, divided and blocked from the possible world on the other side.

"Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence."- William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, "The Argument", 1790

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Got any tobacco?