Last year towards the end of May I stopped smoking. To be totally truthful, I’ve had one-and-a-half cigarettes since last May.

The first one was in Istanbul. I had forgot my passport in the hotel safe, was halfway to the airport in a minivan with the Greenhouse group I was doing a feature on, got dropped off with my luggage in the middle of the highway, took a taxi back downtown, got dropped off 5km away from the hotel because the whole area was sealed off to traffic during the Istanbul marathon, ran 5km of the Istanbul marathon, with my luggage, in the opposite direction to all the runners, while all the time on the phone to the hotel staff telling them the code to the safe where my passport was, asking them to get it ready for me to pick up thinking I could still make the flight back to Tel-Aviv, but in all the noise of the tens of thousands of runners around me the hotel person couldn’t hear me and I couldn’t hear her, so she got the password wrong three times and the safe was now permanently locked and the hotel security manager with a special access code would have to be brought to the hotel from the other side of Istanbul, but can only get within a 5km radius and would have to make the rest on foot, so I would have to wait at the hotel, which I did, while on the phone to Turkish Airways to see how late I could arrive before my flight, and lining up another taxi, and making sure he knows to drive like the wind to the airport. Just before the security manager arrived and collected my passport, I asked someone for a cigarette. It was a Marlboro, and it tasted really good. Good thing I had it because the day didn’t get any better. I got to the airport with 15 minutes to spare before take-off [taxi driver was a real sport], took my belt and shoes off on the run before I even got to the metal detector, got to the check-in counter where they processed my ticket, sprinted to the boarding gate which obviously was far away from the check-in counter and was stopped dead in my tracks by big Turkish airport security. Too late. Plane has boarded. Panting, angry, pleading, threatening, panting, please please please. No. You don’t understand I need to get on that flight there are sick people back home its an emergency call your manager if you have to come on the plane is still on the ground. Missed my flight, even though technically I got there before the plane actually took off and they could have let me on board really, if they wanted to. They also overcharged me for the next flight out that night saying the only seat available was business class which turned out to be a bloody lie as there were plenty of open seats all over the plane. Spend 10 hours in the airport and wrote this, got on the plane and wrote this in a mood. One day karma will reckon with Turkish Airways.

The other half cigarette I had the night of a really bad break-up. I started smoking it just after she drove off, got half way through the LM light and tossed it away. It tasted really bad.

And that was that. I’ve inhaled a lot of second-hand smoke since then, but haven’t put a cigarette in my mouth and lit up for exactly one year now.

What really scares me is hearing people say that after 3, 5, and 10 years they still feel like smoking. Does it ever go away? Sometimes I catch myself walking towards a smoker, or a group of smokers on the sidewalk just to catch the smoke around them. Sometimes I see them and I keep my distance. Sometimes after a good meal and dessert, and coffee, I feel like a smoke. But usually the craving goes away after a few seconds.

I started smoking at age 14 and stopped age 31. Life is better this way.