The sky is an impenetrable grey sheet. No more rain yet. No sun either. Just grey. This year of strange weather has continued into the summer. We've had one, maybe two, warm days so far. It has been much hotter in such chilly places as Minneapolis and Chicago than it has been in Atlanta. The summers here used to be rough, but this year I've only really needed the air conditioning to get rid of the humidity on occasion. It's been pleasant but I suppose there's still plenty of time for things to heat up.
Seventeen days without a drink. One week without a smoke. I thought that if I took away my primary crutches I could expect to find myself anxious, stressed and irritable. But the opposite has largely been the case. Most of that strange pressure that radiates out from my sternum--I think of it as a family marker, kind of a somatic coat of arms or something--has dissipated, leaving me feeling more lucid than I have in some time.
I didn't start smoking until after I was thirty ( I trace it back to the daily sheesha pipe in Egypt) and I've quit before for long months at a time. But when something stressful would come up I would find myself wanting a smoke. So when the teaching workload started piling up last semester and I had to deal with the plagiarists, I took refuge in menthols, telling myself that I would quit when the semester ended. I missed the deadline by six or seven weeks.
I often said that I like smoking because cigarettes punctuate time, providing me with a brief window of relative stillness bounded by the ritualistic movements of smoking. Dividing time seemed important and helpful somehow; I have a difficult relationship with time. Quitting smoking, I told people, was like reading a book with no punctuation marks--everything just ran together. But whatever solace I might find in a cigarette was fleeting, obviously, and no sooner would I finish one before I was wondering when I might have another. I decided that smoking was more about consumption than time. And now that I am abstaining it feels to me that cigarettes did not so much divide time as interrupt it regularly. And while I think that's true, I would not go so far as to deny that sometimes a cigarette is exceedingly pleasant.
To those of you I owe calls or emails, I apologize for my tardiness. Communication shall be forthcoming. I should also add that nice guys are occasionally rewarded…the rarity makes it that much sweeter. Here comes the sun, right on cue. How cinematic.
