All smokers go to heaven

Can we talk about this, please?

I have been having crazy cigarette-craving dreams for a few months now, since just around Christmas. They usually go like this:

JoBiv finds herself in strange environs, and quickly realizes this place is actually an obstacle course set between her and the ultimate prize - a cigarette! She yearns to have that little cigarette between her lips, to suck its sweet nectar into her lungs, to blow incredible smoke rings like a regular virtuoso. More than this, she knows she can. She's known how to all along, and just needs the cigarette to prove it.

But first... she must leap over swamp pits, avoid acid waterfalls, defend herself against attacking brothers, and find her way through labyrinthine corridors. She gets there, at last! There it is, tiny, vulnerable, and ALAS! soaked in suds or poison or disintegrated by someone's thoughtless footfall. Her whole body feels the loss of this little life-saver...

And then I wake.

Since these dreams began I've had this real curiosity about whether I was meant to be a smoker. Maybe that's my destiny in life, somehow. I will buy a pack of cigarettes, walk out onto the street and rummage for the matches that usually hide in my purse somewhere (because I am both a klepto and a pyro and believe it makes me more useful to smokers who may someday want to be my friends), come up emptyhanded... and then the tall, dark, handsome stranger emerges from the shadows to flick a flame from his very classy, possibly vintage, art deco lighter. We are simultaneously smitten. He whisks me away to Spain and buys me dinners with olives in them and bottles of smooth red wine. We wear a lot of red, in general, and my eyelashes grow longer and thicker so that when I look at him across the table, the single votive separating us lights my face in such a way that he loses his breath for a moment, and MUST have me... forevor.

Okay, and I also believe, somewhere in this mind of mine that doesn't really believe the above scenario is possible on this earth, that all of my symptoms and ticks will disappear with the first drag. You know that story in Sedaris' Naked? "A Plague of Tics"? In which he is a mailbox-lickin', head-poundin', OCD-riddled youth until he goes to college, starts smoking, chills the fuck out and thus makes an easy entrance into normal society? Maybe that's MY brilliant future! Just maybe...

But, no, I must resist. First of all, the cost is prohibitive. Honestly... $5 a pack - who can afford that? I can't even afford fresh fruit. Also, there is that niggling cancer problem. Fruit wins over carcinogens, no contest. The last, but sadly probably the strongest argument against my takin' up smoking... my whole family smokes. All of them. My dad pretends he doesn't, but he sneaks one occasionally. And my mother has battled her nic addiction since she was 14 or so, trying hypnosis, patches, pills, gums, everything... still hasn't kicked it, and it's getting worse all the time. When I went home for Baby Girl's birthday party this past fall, some dam had broken in my absence. My mother had never reeked of smoke before, but now her fingers, her clothes, her breath all stank to high heaven. She covets her habit like an alcoholic, sneaking away to buy cigarettes when no one's paying attention, waiting for my brothers to come in from the porch so she can luxuriate in her smoking alone, have two or three instead of one with no accusatory eyes on her. She is ashamed and defensive, and completely irrational when someone gets between her and her nic-fix.

I know I will become my mother in a lot of ways, but I can spare myself this.