Quitting

Once you quit it becomes almost impossible to keep on trying. It’s hard to quit. You need to be adamant about your quitting. You need to face not just yourself in the mirror. Because even after you’ve made peace, even after the calm nights when you can finally lie in bed beside your quitting, there are tremors. Tiny, leftover tremors that triggered when you speak to others about how you’ve quit.

Sure, it’s easy, all smiles, and shit. But mostly you see it in the small details. The tiny, almost imperceptible twitches near their mouths, the shin jerk, the quickly gone twinkle in their eyes when you first inform them that yes, you’ve quit. Later on, you get stuck doing things from before you’ve quit. You know, all the habits related to pre-quit. And it hits you then: that once you’ve quit, this action has also lost its meaning, its point.

“you think this madness is attractive until it happens
to yourself”
-David Byrne, Dance on Vaseline