They call it quitting in America. Sudden and certain and sure of itself.

I quit. That’s done with. Move on.

Here, we linger. We try. We attempt. We’re sort of thinking of packing it in a week on Wednesday.

We schedule in advance for a day that never quite arrives.

And then one day last spring, Mike came home from the car boot sale with a DVD about stopping smoking. It was by a man who a friend of mine has been swayed by on at least three of his attempts to give up. So I felt that I was about to spend time with a mutual friend.

I’d already started to fall out of love with smoking. Partly, I think, through having lived through six months of the smell of Mike’s smoke drifting upstairs each morning.

Someone else’s cigarette isn’t a good scent to wake up to.

So he bought the film home and declared our first health kick and decided that we’d watch the film and then give up.

He likes to be the man of the house and make the big decisions. And I enjoy letting him. Occasionally.

I went along with it. And I stopped. Straight away, all suddenly and American, I quit.

Mike now smokes in the garden, and when it’s raining he smokes under a little overhang outside the conservatory. And he promises that he’ll give up on some indefinite date in the future.

I’ve returned to it twice since in the past year, and I’ve had a packet of ten each time.

Once on a night with my sister, sitting in her garden and putting all sort of things to rights with the world.

And once with an old friend who I’ve managed to pursuade back to smoking on many of the times that he’s given up. I suppose it was only fair that he would return the favour and tempt me back there for an evening.

So not quite a tale of quitting, but kind of close-ish and almost there.

(Written for the Studio 30 Plus prompt “Write about something you quit”)