How to quit.

On slowly letting go and taking the long way home.

I started smoking cigarettes two years ago.

It was right around the time I fell in love with an actress who had been smoking on and off since she was twelve years old. I don’t blame her. She certainly didn’t place the cigarette to my lips, hold a gun to my head and make me inhale.

If I blame anyone, I blame my childhood babysitter.

Mallory was my very first crush. Unfortunately, there was a considerable age gap between us. I was six, maybe seven years old. She was nineteen.

Mallory was the definition of cool. She drove a black Mitsubishi Eclipse, wore low-rise jeans and skin-tight belly shirts, listened to Alanis Morissette and chain-smoked Newports. Every time Mallory arrived at our house to watch me and my two brothers, I’d run out the front door and leap into her arms as if she had just returned from war.

To this day, I could pluck Mallory’s scent out of a Yankee Candle—that unique amalgamation of tobacco and rose-scented perfume.

Mallory had a boyfriend. I hated him.

Like a dog with a bird in his mouth, he was constantly bringing her gifts. Roses. Jewelry. Peanut butter banana shakes. Mallory loved peanut butter banana shakes. She would greet him at the end of our driveway, leaping into his arms the way I did hers.

They would whisper sweet nothings into one another’s ears and make out behind his little Chevrolet S-10. Their heads poking out above the cab like two horny teenage groundhogs.

All the while, I would stand in the window, peering through the gaps in the blinds, seething. Just seething.

As the months passed, I noticed Mallory’s stomach begin to grow. Slowly at first and then all at once. When Mallory later broke the news to me that she was pregnant, I ran to my room and wailed. I wasn’t old enough yet to understand how such things occurred. All I knew was that her boyfriend was going to be in the picture for a while.

To add salt to the wound, Mallory asked me to be the ring bearer at their wedding.

Seeing that her little boy had a crush, my mother did the best she could to console me. She explained to me that—while I couldn’t see it in the moment—there would be other girls that would make me feel the way Mallory did.

Fast-forward more than two decades to the Hotel Chelsea—just a few weeks before I started smoking. I walked into the lobby, turned the corner and saw this woman gazing at a painting hanging on the wall. When she turned towards me and smiled, she looked like the rest of my life.

She smelled like Mallory.

We fell in love quickly—perhaps too quickly. Not long after our rendezvous, I flew out to see her in Los Angeles where she was filming. Smoking became a shared ritual between us. We would make love. We would have a smoke. We would talk about art. We would have a smoke. We would stroll to our favorite dinner spot in Silver Lake. We would have a smoke. We would wake up in the morning, pour ourselves a cup of coffee. We would have a smoke.

I know the very moment I developed an addiction. It was late. We were out on the balcony. I was without clothes. She was wrapped in our comforter. We were sharing a cigarette and gazing up at a moon so swollen that, if it were a piece of fruit, I would have plucked it out of the sky and halved it. I remember thinking in that moment of the line by Kurt Vonnegut, “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.”

When I returned to Nashville, I kept smoking. I smoked constantly. I’ve said it before and I will say it again: smoking makes everything in life more romantic.

Unfortunately, it kills you.

Our love affair lasted nine months. I’m not ready just yet to rehash the end. To make sense of it. To turn it into prose. But, honest to God, I’m not sure how many more loves like that I have left in me.

After we decided to go our separate ways, smoking was no longer a celebration of life but a means of suppressing the grief that life brings.

I finally decided to quit six months after our break-up—once I had arrived at a place where the thought of her didn’t take me out at the knees.

Years ago, I was recording Pink House in Woodstock. One of my close friends—who is a recovering alcoholic—asked me to join him at an AA meeting. We grabbed a seat near the back of the room and listened to the stories these men shared. In AA, they teach a framework that can be applied to anyone trying to quit anything.

Don’t say: “I’m never going to drink again.”

Instead say: “I’m not going to drink today.”

I can’t speak for everyone. However, if I tell myself I’m never going to do something again, I will almost certainly do it. If I were Sisyphus, I’d have to tell myself sweet little lies. I just have to wrestle this boulder up the mountain today. I can figure out tomorrow, tomorrow.

That’s how I’ve approached quitting smoking.

I wake up and I tell myself, “I’m not going to smoke today.”

Some days, I slip up.

I’ll find myself completely overwhelmed. I’ll go for a run. It won’t help. I’ll go move some weights in the gym. It won’t help. I’ll scorch myself in the sauna. It won’t help. I’ll freeze myself in the cold plunge. It won’t help. I’ll pray. It won’t help.

As a last resort, I’ll drive up the block to this little corner store where they know me by name. They smile when they see me walk through the door. They’re in on the joke. They’ve become somewhat accustomed to this bizarre practice.

I’ll walk to the counter, ask for a pack of green American Spirits. I’ll pay the cashier. Pull a cigarette from the pack. Throw the pack into the trash can. I’ll wince thinking about those 19 unsmoked cigarettes ending up in the landfill. Before I can reach my hand in and pluck them out, I turn and put as much distance between myself and the waste bin as I can. I climb back into the car. Roll down the windows. Light up. Toss something on. Then gun it down Gallatin.

These days, I’m throwing about one pack away every month.

As my headlights knife their way through the dead of night, I’ll take the long way home. I don’t allow myself to admit it out loud often. But, I’m tired. I’m really tired. I don’t always know how to move forward when there is so much behind me. This is why I like driving.

You can’t drive looking backwards, you know?

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