The final basketball game of my high school career did not go as planned. When the final buzzer let out, so did the air in my lungs; I was desperate, crushed, and lost. My world hinged on that goddamn orange ball and that sense of value. That court is where I worked out emotions (my Achilles heel for a future in basketball) and the weirdness that life presents. I searched for answers about my existence running up and down in gyms and placing myself in violent struggles against mental and physical demons.

I should have seen my reaction to this final episode coming. But I was young and sheltered. Basketball was Zeus’s bosom for me. Once the finite nature of experience hit me for the first time, I knew what it was to be without purpose. And I sat there in my car, after the game, being a melodramatic fool, listening to The Offspring Race Against Myself with saline dripping down my face. I needed something, anything, a swan dive into a lake of numb.

That first cigarette served a purpose. I didn’t want to feel that thing they called pain, and I didn’t understand that this was only a stopping point in a long road. Earlier in the year my parents found my stash of booze, and I made a promise not to drink until after high school. I wasn’t about to break that agreement, so drinking wasn’t an option.

I still went to parties during the year, but I was the one who drove and observed teenagers behaving badly. So, there I was, at a party, talking to a friend on the patio, and he could see that I was barely keeping it together. He offered me a cigarette and said I would feel drunk off of the smoke and nicotine. I lit that Marlboro Red, my lungs filled with a heavy fog, and then I exhaled. With a click, my nerves began to jump and jive. My head popped off my neck and floated to the balcony ceiling. I had my release. I no longer felt the finality of the game earlier that night. I was gone. And that is the last time I would ever get that sensation from a cigarette.

Over the next five years, the image, the idea, the culture, the urge, and the absence of autonomy led me to a pack a day habit. I was filling proverbial holes in the proverbial dam with cotton filters, loose leaf tobacco, keg parties to create an image that satisfied the rebel in me. I would stand in doorways, in sub-zero temperatures; talking to people I didn’t care to know, only to feel like I was part of something, anything. Those cold fingers and toes weren’t for nothing though; many intellectual and ridiculous conversations exploded from the minds of those smoking. And I still enjoy that outsider mentality we embraced.

I eventually came to the decision that I needed to quit. Cigarettes were going up in price. The idea that I was a slave to myself taxed my soul. I held cigarettes over my head like mistletoe, and I no longer wanted to kiss my pity party. I bought nicotine gum to manage the frustratingly scattered thoughts. Two weeks after that I was done. I had a slip up when I was wasted about a year later that I don’t remember. Now, six years after that, I can barely imagine myself puffing away, in the dead of winter because I need my nerves endings to fire properly after the effects of nicotine wear off.

True clarity is a rare motherfucker, but I now know that, from basketball to smoke rings, I was merely working on different escape plans. And my Dillinger mode worked marvelously for a while. But here I am, back at it again, with a month of sobriety. Or is that not the same thing? On second thought, I think it is the opposite of escapism. It’s an evaluative period to go over my vices with a fine tooth comb and make sure I am dodging life with booze. Carving out places and then trying to fill the craters in your existence that were never existed  is a lot of work that I don’t ever want to do again. Week 4, here we go.