Smoking

So I've been thinking about Russians this morning, and I'm also experiencing an almost uncontrollable desire to smoke. I used to smoke. I started when I was 14 years old and I took to it like a pro--I smoked about 2 packs a day until I turned 22--then I quit cold turkey. But it's interesting watching your brain flip around. You don't realize how much you lie to yourself until an old addiction rears its head. And so strong, too! It was like SMOKING has just been waiting, flexing his muscles, hanging around in his wife-beater shirt--still looking good, still smelling like sin and violetas, maybe a little scruffier. But good, good good. I'm driving back from dropping off Lilly and it just hits me like lust--and I start thinking--one won't hurt--and I can almost taste it--almost feel it between my fingers--and I start thinking about how I'll just smoke it in the driveway and then throw the rest of the pack away--and how my friend Matt's mom has been smoking 40 years and she doesn't have cancer, so not everyone gets cancer who smokes, and Robinson Crusoe smoked tobacco and he was just fine (even if he is a fictional character--remember that great scene in that book when he discovers tobacco?--it's so funny) And then I realize what's happening, that my mind is like this little kid trying to manipulate me--and I'm a nurse! The secret to managing an addiction--to anything--a person, a substance, an act--is this: You have to accept that you will never stop loving whatever it is you love. You will never ever stop wanting a cigarrette. There will never be a substitute. You just have to realize that you will wake up almost every day wanting one or 16 or whatever desperately and that you will live with that for the rest of your life. And then you need to realize that it is not any different from when you were actively using--you never got enough then, did you? And you're never going to get enough now, either. Suck it up. That's my daily motto: suck it up. Okay, not really. That's my daily motto....today. But finally after 12 years, the cravings went away, so today is a surprise.
18 years ago yesterday, I ran away in the middle of the night with someone I met in a bar--married him and had two kids (Lilly and Nick). My fiance had cheated on me, and I had just quit smoking the week before, so I think I might have been technically insane. We just jumped in the car and started driving. And then we went a little bit farther, and a little bit farther, and then we were in New Orleans, and then, we somehow crossed some line, the line when you can't turn around and ever go back, and it was completely out of our control. The road got us, the river just swept us out to sea.
It's hard this time of year--people talk about wanderlust--but if you're cursed with it, it's as much of a problem as smoking. I start chafing in November, and I still find myself going--always have--when I was 13 I ran to Atlanta--it's this strange thing, because, I'm seem so quiet and darn normal. But I slip out of back doors and find myself on trains or buses heading who knows where, and I feel so alive. When I'm running away, I feel so completely myself. I feel like the world is really mine, and that I am in the middle of my own story, instead of a handmaiden in the stories of others--I don't feel male or female, old or young. I just hold my nose and plunge...man...
we get this idea that we have to stay in the stories others have written for us--but we don't, not really. The world is a big place, and you are free, even though you might not realize it. We think we have to act out these scripts, but we don't. It's scary when you think of it, because the stories we receive kind of keep us in dreams, and keep us from living and waking up to our moments and our choices--if you really feel the clarity and potential of each moment--as well as the terror and the death in it--you can get overwhelmed.
But if you ever want to know it, who you really are, for a little bit, one morning, just keep driving until you remember your story and turn around.