Cigarette Blues Mk II

There’s this very attractive girl who I will see every now and then for a while. She smokes. I don’t.

Smoking is such an easy in for conversation, and it especially helps when you want some time relatively alone with someone. Smoking means leaving the building, and if I smoked too, it would be so easy to leave with her. I could then start stammering away at an awkward conversation with her, and totally fuck up any chance of seeming like I’m worth being around. But at least it’d be an easy way to try. As it stands now, I don’t even have that.

I used to be what they call a “social smoker.” I’d smoke when I needed an excuse to get away from everyone, and I’d smoke when I wanted to talk with the other smokers. It was easy then. It wasn’t the crazy “smoke until you don’t care about things anymore” that I was doing at the end there. God, that was terrible. Smoking feels great, but it also somehow manages to feel incredibly shitty at the same time, especially when you’re chain smoking like I was in the last month before I quit. Then again, the only reason I was doing that was to avoid bawling my eyes out over the breakup that I had just gone through. As soon as my nicotine “high” wore off, I’d immediately feel suicidal and it would take everything in me to keep myself from crying. As a solution, I decided to never let myself fall from that nicotine high. I also drank and heavily used substances, but that’s another story for another time.

I kind of wish that I could be a social smoker again, but I know that picking up a pack will cause my habit to eventually spiral into the catastrophic mess that it did before. It still makes me sad. I guess a lot of things still make me sad, though.