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I may have been only 12, but I knew trouble when I saw it. My mother marched into the kitchen from the backyard, looking fierce and yelling my name. Her left arm was held far from her body, and pinched between thumb and index finger, as if she were holding the tail of a very dead fish, was a white cigarette butt. She dropped it on the counter with disgust.

Mom stared at me, disbelieving, accusing, and oh so righteous. She had found the wayward smoke in the garden, lying on my dead hamster's homemade plaster gravestone. How did she know the cigarette butt was mine? Who else visited Bonnie's grave?

Five years later, dressed in the telltale white shirt and plaid skirt of a Catholic high school girl, I was grabbing a quick drag in the bathroom before my next class. Without warning, my chatty, smoking classmates suddenly disappeared into toilet stalls, leaving me alone to face Madame Les Miserables, my French teacher. "Marie Louise Petite!" she yelled. Off I trudged to the dean of girls, who chain-smoked throughout a rather terse telephone conversation with my mother.

What Mom and the dean didn't realize was that for me, cigarettes let me grab my life and fling it haphazardly out of their reach. It was an action of independence, a five- minute moment when my life was my own and I did with it as I pleased. It was the early 1970s, and at least I wasn't dropping acid or my pants, for that matter. I just smoked, voraciously.

If cigarettes were my teenage muse, their temple was the basement break room under the coffee shop of our city's oldest and most worn-out grand hotel. I washed dishes there during high school, part time and poorly, at best. I read Dostoyevsky and wondered about God, ignoring the diminishing inventory of clean silverware, while thin, nervous waitresses kept cigarettes lit in the dish room, pulling the longest drags in history while laughing tenuously about their husbands' alcohol consumption and deriding their teenage daughters' love lives.

At 18, I took my Zippo lighter, left the hotel, and spent two summers reporting for the local daily newspaper, sitting face to face with a nasty newsroom vet named Jack. Experience and ignorance were separated only by two grimy typewriters and even grimier air. I met him ash for ash those two summers, his Lucky Strike smoke twisting around my Marlboro haze.

A year later, at 20, I had my first cigarette in front of my mother. We were sitting in a limousine outside the church after my father's funeral. Grief, a smoke, and a truce.

A decade later, at 30, I took a hard look at my smoking. It wasn't Mom's fault. It wasn't even the fault of untold millions spent on cigarette advertising, filled with happy, glamorous, successful, and surprisingly healthy people. No, cigarettes and I had struck a bargain, and I was solely responsible. Cigarettes were friends, symbols, time wasters, emotion stuffers, energizers, emphasizers, ego-builders, image enhancers. Cigarettes kept things under control. Angry? Take a deep breath (as deep as you dare) and light up. Feeling good? Sit back and shake hands with your favorite brand. Got the blues? Bring out your pack-a-day pal.

Time passed, and for me the chance to slow it down had appeal. Perhaps I could restore my naturally ruddy complexion, which had faded to a pasty gray. Or vanquish a cough and a history of bronchitis that had become chronic. Or breathe at a regular pace when walking up stairs. Or have some extra pocket change. Or just smell better.

So, shortly after I turned 30, my old friend, my muse, my betraying beloved well, we parted ways. If I had been Jewish, I would have sat shivah. The grieving lasted nearly a year. I had times of bad feelings and strong cravings. I got lots of help from people who cared about me. And I discovered something important.

The feelings? They pass. And every time they return they are weakened, dimmer, less powerful. I had only gained by abandoning my betraying, dramatic friend, and my losses were imaginary. I still knew who I was without an ashtray full of spent cigarettes and a morning cough. I could still do my work, write, have ideas, manage projects and people just as I did when I smoked, although I had more energy and people didnšt scowl anymore when I got on an elevator.

That was 17 years ago. Occasionally I wish I could enjoy my old friend, just for a minute or two, but I know that's impossible. Our romance is through, and all that's left are the memories. Hopefully. MM

Mary Small, a Duluth native and Minneapolis writer, found her love of cigarettes early. The affair ended with the irrational rage common to ill-fated, addictive romance.