Quit smoking!!!

It has been more than eight months since I stubbed the butt of my last cigarette and hence, I have never touched a cigarette. My decision to quit smoking coincided with the birthday of a friend. Though she had nothing to do with me quitting smoking, but that’s how I remember the day I quit smoking and also the day she was born.
Like every morning, I woke up on September 29 and went downstairs from my room to have my daily share of smoke. It was a Saturday and my weekly off and I had no cash with me. But I had been so regular, buying cigarette from the shop below my house that I didn’t feel that the shopkeeper would refuse me a cigarette just because I didn’t have money at one instance. I went to the shop; the shop was being manned by the shopkeeper’s son. I asked for a cigarette and was given a Navy Cut. I put it between my lips and was about to lit it. I told the man that I would pay later as I wasn’t carrying change. To be honest, I had no money at the moment. The shopkeeper’s son protested, “You shouldn’t have taken the cigarette if you didn’t have the cash.” I told him to take back the cigarette t which he replied that I had put it between my lips. So keep quiet, I will give you your money later, I told him sternly and left the shop.
I felt insulted. I went to my room and lit the cigarette and as I breathed the puffs deeper and longer, I felt humiliated too. Humiliated, because of a cigarette worth Rs 3.50! Why can’t I bridle my desire to smoke? Why do I have to go every morning to have a cigarette before starting the day? What does it offer me? Smoke, insult and susceptibility to diseases. By the time, I pulled the last puff deeper and deeper, I had decided. This was the last cigarette I was smoking. And thus I quit smoking.
The desire to quit smoking had always been there but the will was lacking. And the will had been weakened by my own perceptions over the time. Every time I would decide to quit smoking I used to yield to the temptation of breathing one last puff which never turned out to be the last one. And I had concluded that the cigarette was my Mehbooba (beloved). A mehbooba whom whenever I wanted pressed between my lips. A beloved who never protested, nor ever indulged in any kind of histrionics. Both of us were singeing ourselves to burn the other and both of us were deriving pleasure from the fire.
Perceptions! They keep changing. There had been a time when I used to think that she was the girl I could not live without. She went away. And still I survived.
Initially, when she had left me, I found a ready companion in cigarettes. There had come a time when I used to smoke as many as three packs of cigarettes. I would light one before kick starting my bike while going to office. I would stop on the way and light another and finally, after reaching the officer I would smoke. That was how I had recoiled to smoking cigarettes in the aftermath of that relationship. That was not the first relationship I had been in nor the last but one thing, I can say for sure is that that was the relationship in which I had invested maximum emotional energy, so much so, that I feel emotionally bankrupt in relationships and friendships I have been in after that.
I had picked up the habit of smoking when I was at BHU. It was surely not under peer pressure as not any of my friends smoked. It might have been to show off. What had started as a fad had turned into an addiction by the time I joined IIMC at Delhi. However, I had been successful in keeping the count of cigarettes I smoked very low till I got into job. And then…