God, but I would commit murder for a cigarette right now. In one week, I will have been quit for a year, and I have no fucking intention of re-starting now. But there’s something in the air tonight. Got home too late to get to the gym with enough time to do anything useful, so I decided to take a walk. I found myself wandering the backstreets of Tooting, Tom Waits “Mule Variations” on the headphones, absolutely dying for a smoke.

And then it started to piss it down, fittingly. So I stamped back home, all wet leather and drowned rat, and am drinking a dose of whiskey in a fruitless attempt to take the edge of this craving.

This has happened quite a bit in the last few weeks. I make jokes about being willing to tear someone’s arm off for a tab, but most of the time, I’m pretty good, to be honest. But just this last fortnight?

I’ve done a pretty good job of re-wiring myself over the last year. I am Healthy, now. But there’s part of me that still smokes, in my head.

Most people seem to have a pretty concrete image of me. There is, apparently just something about me that people can see a base state in. For example: even my friends who say I would look better with short hair, admit (for the most part) that I wouldn’t look like me with short hair. This extends to my personality, as well, where I am, I’m told, either distressingly easy to read, or totally impossible to figure out. There’s just something I project – “an energy about me” as one friend puts it. Everyone does it, I’m sure, but a few people have been commenting on it to me in the last month or two.

But nights like tonight make me wonder if this base me, the one that my friends form a picture of in their heads, smokes.

Because I’m pretty sure the bastard does.