By
August 23, 2007 6:00 AM
Real time is not newspaper time. In real time I have quit for 20 days.
In the past few days I have begun to feel like a person who doesn't smoke. Instead of missing the act and all its parts (like visiting the nice people at Cabot Street Market), there is not-missing. I can't go so far to say a there is a fullness, because not smoking remains an absence (best pronounced with a French accent).
I have found myself at times musing over a life without butts and feeling an achy, empty lonely road stretched out before me. Me without. Just me and my shriveling nicotine receptors cranking out nostalgia in a calculated attempt to win my sympathies. My rational brain tells me what this phenomenon is and compensates for it (Don't be pathetic! Life without butts will bring only good things, good health and maybe even running or some other sport I can't sustain right now).
Twenty days has been long enough to have developed a yin to the yang of "the black hole of craving." This new feeling also radiates from mid-chest and is akin to solitude in good company. It is contentment shaded with gratitude for simple things (because contentment without gratitude has an expiration date). It is the abundance of seeds in an heirloom tomato — a promise to cross the seasons. It's a great book and the focus to read it.
This lovely state of being happens to be a great counterpoint to a now near nightly experience of sleep talking, a habit I am primarily aware of because of a tendency to wake myself up, what with all the yelling. Most recently, on a trip north. This was not a welcome thing in a hotel room stuffed with sleeping kids, wet bathing suits and detritus of fudge. It's because of this medication. The literature states "changes in dreaming" in the top four side effects.
This is not the first medication to have influenced my dreams. The first shall be nameless. But let's just say this; it was ineffectual. Those dreams were downright hallucinogenic. To begin with, there was no space-time continuum between sleep and waking. I would lay my head on the pillow and immediately be in deep stage, quixotic sleep. On its own, such immediate slumber wouldn't be such a bad thing, 2-4 a.m. waker-upper that I am. But the dreams, the dreams ... I shudder to recall, not merely their content but a predictably relentless calliope turn to funhouse proportions. And this calliope was no muse of epic Greek poetry; this was Medusa, arisen in my personal night. I lasted about five nights before presenting to my PCP as nutty as Poe.
These dreams are different, tolerable thankfully. Slightly less vivid, but similarly without a union representative to demand they punch out every now and then. When one considers that during my waking hours I am rarely focused on inhaling tobacco into my lungs, yes, tolerable.
By day, I find myself reclaiming what I relinquished (with complicity) all those long years back when the promise of a good life was still a promise and not yet a derailed reality. This little pill just may be the better-living-through-chemicals contract of the '60s. And I'm not a miracle person. I'm the one in my profession who notes the cute marketing name, then asks "but what does the product do?
I'm a process girl. Sometimes painfully so, but ech, that's me. This process is different enough that it not only deserves its own description, but (heck) its own shrine, a living compact to aspire to this feeling, or at least remember it clearly enough in the dead of winter (actual and emotional) to resist the gravitational pull of 'the hole'.
I think I am really giving a quit-claim deed to tobacco, a sayonara, a slip out the back Jack. When you are truly gone, I know I won't miss you. Today I can breathe, today I don't want to smoke. Today I miss it a little bit less than yesterday.
Portsmouth native Suzanne Danforth is a nominee (but not winner) of the Pulitzer Prize some moons ago and band geek from way back, now returning to her roots as a writer. She can be reached at suzanne.danforth@gmail.com.
THANKS FOR FEEDBACK
I have received an amazing number and quality of e-mail responses since publication of this column. It has made it less lonely when in the grips of wondering why I have done this, and comforting. Not alone, not alone. To each of you, thanks. Thank you to those long quit for your inspiration and strategy sharing. Thank you to recent quitters for keeping it up! Most importantly, thank you to the strugglers for being kind to yourselves and for the willingness to try, or to try again.
