This is a love song and this is a blog post

So I've given up smoking, again; for I gave up before, some ten–eleven years ago (and the times long before that when I gave up for my children, whilst pregnant, don't count for now, okay, or this post will become way too tangenty). That time it was for a man, because of a man, because of a man I'd decided would make the difference in my life (you know how it can be, when one is young and/or foolish; as if another person – any person – could actually be the maker of a difference), and this man, he was not really going to go for it, for me, he had his reasons I guess, but on the other hand, he didn't really want to be short of me either; and so he said, "I would never date a woman who smoked", and here was li'l ol' me, a steady twenty-or-more-a-day girl, right; so I decided, right, you'll need to come up with a better fucking excuse, mister, or maybe even be emotionally truthful (for once! Seems, in retrospect, that I actually knew the things that would eventually become the real sticking points, even then; but why I still kept wanting him to make the difference in my life, I cannot rightly say, except to say that at that point in my life, I hadn't got to the very lonely place where you realise that you yourself are the only difference-maker there ever will be; lonely but in its way, safe, and where well-being and/or contentedness is enabled and made possible, if not ever-present or even likely). And so, dear Reader, I gave up smoking for this man. But this post is not about that time, or that man, either, strictly speaking; it is enough to say that I discovered first that he wasn't and wasn't going to be the difference-maker of my life, although sadly I discovered that a little later than might have been ideal; and then secondly, I discovered that neither was anybody else, at all, ever, in this world and this life, and we've no knowledge of another one; and this is when I began what became known as my hermithood, for I really couldn't be with people, not unless it was absolutely necessary. Anyway; also by this point, I had started to smoke again. Oh, smoking; it is the thing you can control which makes you feel loved, when nothing else apart from being loved would make you feel loved, and you cannot feel loved because you aren't loved, and even if you were, you don't want it or you know it's not real, and you know it never will be the love that will make the difference and heal the wound, but you can decide "I think I'll have a fag", and another, and another, and you can run to your ciggies when anything hurts and it often does. So I've given up again. Smoking, I mean; for I still, you know, fall in love with people occasionally, people who will never have me, never make the difference; I'm forty-five in two months and a day, and I still do it, you know; the difference being, now I'm mostly aware of the pain I'm going for, buying the pain along those few moments of the unnameable joy of believing in the loving and the difference being made; but I've given up smoking and while it can never be said that I've given up for good, I'm not smoking now, I haven't smoked for coming on twelve weeks now, and while I miss being loved I am being very big and brave, teaching myself it is possible to live like this, existing on the strength of my own weakness, on my own weak strength, my own strong weakness, I don't know what it is; but even when I still dream of you making the difference, my darling, I know you never, ever, ever will, and I will forever be alone, and that it is okay…