every time i read anti-smoking comments on ohnotheydidnt i get pissed. listen: smoking involves a lot more than nicotine. i realize some people get physically addicted, but ummm, smoking is also emotional.

never once has liz suffered a nic fit, twitch omg i need a cigarette! i just loved to smoke. a pack or two a day. smoking was my hobby. hey elizabeth what are your weekend plans? oh, yknow, a carton. i recently quit smoking & it wasn’t v. difficult. i just stopped, without warning or premeditation. i do miss it.

i miss the smell of it. the taste of it. i miss riding in the car listening to astral weeks or white like white heat. cigarettes help you make friends: outside the bar, on campus, waiting for the bus or on break at work. they give you something do instead of staring at the wall all afternoon. they help you lose weight. they taste great with anything from old chub to miller lite. a boy’s mouth. the post-coital cigarette. smoking in bed. indoors is best. you don’t even have to leave the apartment for days if you have cigarettes.

this is what makes quiting hard. not nicotine. not the ever-touted “buzz”, fear of cancer or hacking coughs. cigarette love, cigarette life.

"Give me your hand:
Now I’m going to tell you how I went into that inexpressiveness that was always my blind, secret quest. How I went into what exists between the number one and the number two, how I saw the mysterious, fiery line, how it is a surreptitious line. Between two musical notes there exists another note, between two facts there exists another fact, between two grains of sand, no matter how close together they are, there exists an interval of space, there exists a sensing between sensing—in the interstices of primordial matter there is the mysterious, fiery line that is the world’s breathing, and the world’s continual breathing is what we hear and call silence. "

--Clarice Lispector
(from The Passion According to G. H.)