Day Two

Days Without a Cigarette: 1.55
Days Without Nicotine: 0
Dollars Saved: -$31.79

I could tell today would be harder than yesterday as soon as I woke up.

I’m pretty sure “first thing in the morning” is gonna be my biggest trigger. Other contenders include “getting done with work”, “taking a break from work”, “driving”, “finishing a meal”, and “finishing anything else.” But waking up in the morning without a cigarette is the fucking pits. It was okay yesterday, but I’d psyched myself all the way up for that one. Plus, I had a dentist appointment at 10 am, so I was too busy fretting about that to fret about the cigarette thing all that much.

But this morning it hit me all the fucking way.

Now, on the plus side, I actually didn’t have any trouble falling asleep last night. I fell asleep about as quickly as I normally do, and I didn’t even have any of those technicolor nightmares everybody warned me about. Apparently the patch (and a number of other tobacco cessation methods) come with some pretty fucked up dreams for a lot of people, but I haven’t encountered that problem so far.

But I had plenty of problems this morning. When my hoodie wasn’t hanging on the door handle I thought I’d left it on, I damn near tore the door off its hinges. It took all I had to keep myself from reacting violently to something as benign as my hoodie being elsewhere.

The good news, though, is that I didn’t react violently. I stood there for a full sixty seconds seething at the door handle (which had clearly intentionally misplaced my hoodie just to test me), then I warned Lucinda that I was gonna be a bit more on edge today, then I asked her where she put my hoodie (she’d washed it; it was in the laundry room), then I went to work.

The ‘going to work’ thing was really hard, too. See, my house has a separate apartment upstairs, and that’s where my office is. I’ve got the world’s easiest commute: I go out the front door of my house, swing around the corner, head up a flight of stairs, then go into my office. But that eight second trip through the yard and up the stairs took a solid ninety years this morning. Because that’s where I smoked. I’d go back and forth from the office to the house to the office a dozen times a day and I’d always smoke a cigarette along the way. Hell, if I was going downstairs to grab a soda I’d smoke a cigarette between the office and the house; then I’d pop in for the three seconds it takes to get a drink from the fridge, then I’d smoke another fucking cigarette on my way back to the office. I basically never walked that route without smoking.

The good news is that I made it. The bad news is that I’ve gotta walk that route a good dozen more times today…