If you’ve never tainted your precious pink lungs with the alluring mixture of nicotine and formaldehyde, or you’re a fashion smoker who only lights up at parties and can’t even finish the whole cigarette a real smoker had the good grace to give you, you may not understand the identity crisis that comes with quitting.

I was not a heavy smoker. I would go through a pack every three or four days or so; although, alcohol significantly decreased the amount of time between one pack and the next. Still, I smoked frequently enough that the absence of cigarettes in my daily routine is really fucking with me. What do people even do on their work breaks? Or while waiting for the bus? What motivates them to finally leave their bed in the morning? I’m still getting the hang of it.

I know that, logically, quitting smoking is the right thing to do. I know that I’m saving tons of money, prolonging my life, and, most importantly, I won’t become that old lady you see standing on her porch in hair rollers and a grimey bathrobe with an inch of ash hanging off the end of her cigarette and a chronic death rattle of a cough. I basically gave up smoking to avoid becoming Charlie Day’s mom.

That said, I miss it. All the fucking time. I miss standing on my patio with a cup of coffee and the first cigarette of the day. I miss the sense of camaraderie that there is between fellow smokers; banished to the outdoors by society and forced to endure the glares and disappointed frowns of healthier passers-by. I miss that blissful sense of relief after I’ve been without a cigarette for too long; the feeling of reunion I got with that first drag. I miss sharing drinks and stories and laughs on my friend’s deck as we chain-smoked late into many summer nights.

The thing I miss the most about it, I think, is the convenient escape a cigarette offered when people were being boring and generally awful to talk to. I would simply excuse myself at the first pause in conversation and head outside, and no questions were ever asked. What am I supposed to do now? I’m not a great actress, so I will never be able to feign giving a shit about people’s cats or their work or the dreams they had last night, and one can only use the washroom excuse so many times before people start to suspect you’ve replaced smoking with a rampant coke addiction (I have not).

I miss the luxury of having an excuse to be alone for a few minutes, of having a brief respite from forced conversations to just be, without having someone follow me outside to ask “What’s wrong?”.

“What does any of this have to do with the above video?” you ask. Fair question. I saw these guys at a show this past week, and they happened to dedicate a song to “all the smokers out there”. I don’t remember how the song went, I just groaned and mourned the absence of my long-time friends. After, though, they played this cover of Fleet Foxes’ “Your Protector”. And, yeah, I was a little influenced at the time, but I thought to myself “Hey. This cover is pretty fucking beautiful.” It helps that the original is one of the few songs to give me feelings in my heart area, but still.

My point is that if I were still smoking, I would have immediately gone outside after the song previous to this one for a cigarette of my own, and I would have missed this lovely cover. So, there it is. One bright spot in the miserable, bleak experience that has been the process of quitting smoking. The beam of the lighthouse shining out to me in this sea of turmoil and existential anguish. Maybe there’s hope.

Maybe I won’t drown myself.