Change I Can (Barely) Live With

It has been one week since I smoked a cigarette.

And I don’t like it. Not one little bit.

I don’t feel virtuous. Or triumphant.

I think about that cigarette — that once-a-night cigarette I used to have, that I haven’t had for one week — all the time.

I don’t want to quit smoking. I know I should quit smoking. But I don’t want to.

I’m not even going to say, “I quit smoking.”

I just haven’t smoked in one week. I haven’t bought a pack of cigarettes in one week. I haven’t huddled outside in the cold after the kids are in bed and my “chores” are done to have one cigarette. For one whole week. Seven days.

I am tense and irritable. Cranky as all get-out. I miss my cigarette. I crave it all the time. I think about it all the time. And I think about how I am not going to smoke it. Not tonight, at any rate. I think that every day.

It was my one treat, my one bad-for-me habit. And, to a certain extent, it was that one left-over thing about the single woman I used to be.

It was, ironically, the one thing I clung to in the time-for-me part of my night. The worst thing I could cling to, granted, but that monkey nicotine… Well, it was my monkey.

One week.

Let’s go for two. What do you say?