Going back would take real work

Price out the return trip honestly, as a list of tasks. You would have to decide. Then acquire, which means money, a store, a person, a particular hour of the day. Then a place to do it where the wrong someone will not walk in. Then a story ready for whoever asks, and a second story for the one person you would most hate to tell. That is a project with steps. Staying free tonight asks you to do precisely nothing at all.

That should rearrange something in your head. You have been carrying this as though freedom were the uphill road and the old life were an easy slide waiting under your feet. Check the actual gradients. Freedom is now the path of least effort, and the return trip is the one demanding planning, spending, hiding and lying. You are not straining against gravity. Gravity changed sides a while ago, while you were still braced against the old slope out of habit.

There is a real cost to guarding a road that already runs downhill. Vigilance is not free, and aiming it at a threat that has mostly dismantled itself leaves you tired for no return. Worse, constant guarding keeps the road on your map. You do not patrol places you have genuinely stopped going. The relief here is honest and you are allowed to take it. Some of the watching can end, not because you got careless, but because the thing you were watching for now requires a shopping trip.

So lower the guard by one notch this week. Not recklessness, just an honest recalculation. When the thought arrives, do not brace against it. Price it out instead. Say the whole list plainly: I would have to find cigarettes, buy them, hide them, explain them. Boredom defends you better than fear does, and that list is boring. Thank God the hard road turned into the easy one without you having to be a hero about it daily. You are not holding a door shut. You moved house.