Cigarettes

A few days ago I was going to work and outside of the building was a woman who was smoking a cigarette. In that very moment I had really strong desire to smoke one too.

Cigarettes were a part of my life from my childhood basically. My father is a smoker and when I was about 12 years old I tried to smoke cigarettes. I bought a box of cigarettes and it was easy to get because in that store they knew that I was buying cigarettes for my father. One day after school me and two of my friends went to a place where nobody could see us and we tried smoking. It was funny experience because no one knew how to smoke and no one liked it either. So we put smoking on a side until I came into high school where I started to smoke regularly on every day basis. Me and my schoolmate met before class started and every day we had a cup of coffee and a whole bunch of cigarettes. This became a habit since it was going on for four years. But I still didn’t perceive myself as a smoker since I smoked only when I was in school or out. I never smoked at home – there was only one time when I smoked in my room and I opened balcony door so my mom wouldn’t smell cigarette smoke. I didn’t even bother with that because our house already smelled of smoke. I was afraid that my mother will catch me smoking so I never told her about that. That day I put cigarette butt on the balcony shelf and my mother found it (and she never goes into my room, but that day she miraculously went…). She was very angry at me and she asked me if I smoke but instead of telling her the truth I lied and said to her that I only wanted to try how it feels like. When I got to faculty I stopped smoking for 2 years and I was fine with that. I didn’t have desire to smoke and quitting wasn’t hard at all. I just decided one day that I will stop smoking and I did.

I never smoked because of pleasure. In fact I didn’t like the feeling when smoking. So why did I smoke? Well…I have noticed that I occupied myself with cigarette mostly when I had company because I didn’t want to “draw attention”. When someone asked me something I had cigarette to hold on and play with it just to be more relaxed – I was drawing attention to a cigarette and I felt more confident mostly around people who I just met.

After two years I again started to smoke because I was getting into a whole new society – people I didn’t know and as I said before, cigarette was like a shield to me. And again after 6 months or so, I quitted.

I have this funny feeling for a few days now – when I see someone smoking, or when I just see cigarette itself, I have desire to light one up.