I got home before dark, and that’s when my nose began to bleed. At first I was surprised. Then I was annoyed. Then I was terrified. I am going to bleed to death in this goddamn house, I thought. I leaned over the kitchen sink as what I thought was a massive amount of blood splattered into the sink and splashed, as I would discover soon enough, up onto the black and white tile. My neighbor did me up an ice pack, which worked for quite a while. I had a really nice bath and then, around 10:45, woke from a deep sleep and noticed that my face was wet. Once the lights were on, I discovered an ungodly mess. Later, toward 3 o’clock in the morning, I fell asleep briefly in the living room, where I’d laid down on the rug but made sure my head was resting on the wood floor, figuring that if the bleeding started again, wood – unlike pillows or sheets or blankets or couch cushions or the rug – could be easily washed.
I think New Year’s Eve, a Saturday, was probably the worst of it. My face would feel so hot I feared combustion. Then, moments later, it was like ice. I cancelled my lunch plans and laid down on the floor again. At noon I got up and read a little and then laid down again. And then a little before five I walked to a potluck gathering, which I stayed at for an hour or so. I walked back to my house and went out to the little enclosed back porch out back, where I lit a cigarette and heaved and hacked my way through two drags. I had a cold that entailed some kind of respiratory issue, so as my chest got heavier the act of breathing became more difficult. And so there I stood, smoking. After two drags I put the cigarette out. An hour later I broke all the cigarettes I had in the house into at least three pieces, drenched them in water and then drained them into an empty coffee can. The coffee can, and the one remaining ashtray, were in the garbage before the beginning of 2012.
For me, smoking fell out of the social realm many years ago. I do recall (fondly, I have to say) going out to bars and cafes and restaurants and smoking with other people. There was something very reassuring, I thought, about lighting a cigarette right after the after-dinner coffee was poured. There was a time when I could smoke my way through most of a pack in a single sitting – or standing – at a bar. I also thought that smoking was one of the very few pleasant aspects of driving. Cigarettes somehow added a fleck of civility to the depravity of sitting in traffic on the outskirts of a city famous for incorporating public transportation into its urban planning.
The act of smoking changed so much in a relatively brief period of time. For me, it became very private, and very confined to one particular space. And not long after I quit drinking, I started trying to figure out what it was exactly that would prompt me to light a cigarette. Almost every cigarette I smoked, I figured out, I smoked in order to avoid doing something else. They weren’t relaxing. They weren’t pleasant. They certainly weren’t a whimsical ending to a tasty sexual escapade, and from the vantage point of the fifth full day without one, I don’t exactly miss them, I don’t exactly want one, but I cannot honestly say that their absence has gone unnoticed.
