Alex Goes Off! - 'True Love?'

by Alexander R. Yaremko

There are all kinds of clichés about love. Love hurts, love is a battlefield, all's fair in love and war, you get the picture. Like most clichés, they tend to run on this side of being true. Clichés became cliché because they ring true. If a cliché is what you live by, as in true all the time, you'll run into problems. But the point of a clichés is that they are sometimes, but not always, applicable.

Clichés are often heard in the refrain of love songs (i.e. Love songs say so much...). One of the best, most accurate, and applicable is "hard habit to break." And that's the point really. Bad relationships are habits, not love.

For years I have thought and even proclaimed that my first and foremost love is smoking. I love smoking. The only place I don't smoke is in the shower. At times I've even opted for baths instead of showers just so I could have a cigarette. Have being the operative word here. Contrary to what some people think, you cannot have a person, only a thing. I'm having a smoke, the cigarette has me, and that's not love. You can't love something that doesn't love you back.

And smoking doesn't love me back. Smoking isn't capable of loving me back. How does smoking not love me, let me count the ways. Better yet, we'll leave the specifics up to work by the Ad Council and American Lung Association. I'm not ready to give up my one true love anyway. Suffice it to say that smoking is bad for your health. Intellectually, I know that. And go back for another smoke. Smoking is expensive. I know that. And I go back for another carton.

What I've referred to for years as the love of my life is actually, like all over wrought, melodramatic declarations of love, just a distraction. But a distraction from what? Smoking is five minutes outside alone. Just five precious minutes to yourself. Smoking is a social activity you share with your friends on a night out. Smoking, ultimately, is something to do, whether in the car on your way to work, or with co-workers at happy hour. It plays many roles, but smoking biggest role is that of something to do. Smoking is an activity.

Not yet ready to give up my distraction, my most consistent activity, my companion, smoking, I am ready to consciously, although cautiously, acknowledge that my "luv" is untrue. I've told my best friend my boyfriend is a schmuck, which she already knew but was too much of a friend to say out loud. My love isn't concerned about my happiness, is not capable of such. Now what?

Now what? I have no idea. What do you do when you need to find a new activity? You can't replace something with nothing. But what then do you replace that something, that special something, with. The patch is a great analogy here. A patch to mend (literally?) a broken heart (wink). We'll see. Baby steps I suppose. As pointed out on an episode of "Seinfeld," the first break-up never takes. The process will have to be done in baby steps, because I just discovered today I can take a bath, smoke a cigarette, and type at the same time.