Addiction Blue: A Life Measured in Smoke
I started young. Baseball cap on my head, a cheek full of Copenhagen, I was twelve years old and already burning my way into a habit that would outlast almost every other part of my identity. Two years chewing before I ever touched a cigarette — the hollowed-out pockets in my gums proof of just how hard I was pushing nicotine into my body. It wasn’t rebellion, not exactly. It was fascination with what nicotine did to my system, that little hit of speed and calm at the same time.
Then came the pipe. For most people, a pipe was an affectation, something you puffed without inhaling, savoring the tobacco like wine. But I treated my pipe like a pack of cigarettes. I inhaled every drag, day after day, year after year. I would be the man in the rain with a fedora and a pipe, not eccentric, just welded to a ritual. Over thirty years went by this way. Cigarillos, butt ends, wine-tipped cigars, long road trips punctuated by three packs a day. A cigarette became a unit of time. You lit one, and for those few minutes the world slowed to the rhythm of smoke rising.
It wasn’t just nicotine that held me — it was insomnia. I’ve been wide-eyed since I was five. Nights were long and jagged, and cigarettes filled the hours. Later came Zopiclone — the blue pill that promised sleep, tasted bitter and chemical, and felt like science itself melting into my bloodstream. Officially it was prescribed for jet lag, for insomnia. Unofficially, it became my crutch, my escape hatch. Two blue pills before bed, sometimes more, until I was crunching them in my teeth like candy. When I discovered I could order them online — Canada, India — I wept at the sight of a drawer full of pills. It meant, at least for a while, the terror of sleepless nights was over.
Between the pipe and the pill, I was living in addiction’s hall of mirrors. Nicotine balanced my nerves. Zopiclone shut me down when my brain refused. I smoked at parties, in security shifts on lonely nights, on road trips, at Four Corners, USA. I smoked for nostalgia that had long since evaporated. I smoked because nicotine was the only reliable bridge from one anxious moment to the next.
The quotes from Camus and David Lynch rang truer than any medical advice: smoking as identity, smoking as art, smoking as defiance. Camus wrote, “I didn’t like having to explain to them, so I just shut up, smoked a cigarette, and looked at the sea.” Lynch lamented, “If there’s no smoking in heaven, I’m not going.” They understood that smoking wasn’t just about chemistry — it was about atmosphere. It was about belonging to a strange, outlaw brotherhood of solitary figures leaning against walls, squinting through smoke.
But the world changed. Smoking bans multiplied. The coolness wore off. Friends quit, laws tightened, and I was left with a habit that felt increasingly absurd. Why keep doing it when even the supposed pleasures — taste, break, camaraderie — had eroded? Because I was addicted. Because it was a unit of time, a pause button I didn’t know how to live without.
On July 1st, I quit. Cold. No ceremony, no patches or gum, just a sudden stop. Three months later, I hadn’t returned to smoking. For someone who measured life in smoke, who lived half in nicotine haze and half in chemical blue dreams, quitting felt impossible. Yet here I was, impossible quitter.
But the story didn’t end there. I picked it back up again — not out of compulsion this time, but with a strange sort of pact with myself. I told myself I would only smoke if I was consciously aware of having and enjoying a cigarette. No more automatic drags, no more absentminded packs consumed in the background of life. Now, when I smoke, I bask in it. I bask in the yellowish light that smoking brings out of darkness. I bask in its weight as a symbolic anchor in my soul.
That’s the strange truth of addiction: sometimes it doesn’t leave, it mutates. What was once blind repetition becomes ritual. What was once compulsion becomes, in its own warped way, a kind of mindfulness practice. I no longer light up simply because my body screams for nicotine. I light up when my spirit calls for the stillness that a cigarette carves out of chaos.
Does that make it better? Safer? No. My lungs are still the bottom of a dark well. My teeth have paid the price. My body will bear scars long after the habit is done. But it does make it truer. Smoking is no longer a default. It is chosen. And in that choosing, I’ve re-cast it from an unconscious drag into a symbolic act.
Mark Twain once said, “If there’s no smoking in heaven, I’m not going.” For me, that’s not just a quip — it’s an admission of how deeply smoking has threaded itself into my identity. I know its costs. I know its grip. But I also know that in the flare of a match, in the curl of smoke against the night, there is something more than addiction. There is recognition. There is presence. There is, oddly enough, a kind of faith.
Smoking has been my metronome. My unit of time. My driving companion better than a hitchhiker with gas money. It has been my entrance to bars, to conversations, to long nights alone. Now it is something else: a conscious anchor, a yellow glow in the dark. Addiction blue, burning steady, until it burns no more.