The first one was the only one

There was one early on that actually did something. You can probably still place it. A particular night, a particular age, a feeling of having arrived somewhere you'd been trying to get to. Whatever happened in those few minutes was real enough that you went looking for it again. That one delivered. And then, somewhere in the thousands that followed, quietly and with no announcement made, it stopped delivering, and you kept looking anyway, because looking had become the whole activity.

That isn't a character flaw, it's just machinery. A body meets a thing repeatedly and adjusts to it, so the same amount stops producing the same result and the target keeps stepping backwards. Meanwhile the price climbs, in money, in mornings, in how much of the day has to be arranged around it. The gap between what it cost and what it returned widened every single year, and never on any given day by enough to notice. That's why nobody quits on a Tuesday because the arithmetic finally moved.

So look squarely at what those last years actually were. You weren't enjoying thousands of cigarettes. You were auditioning each one for a part only the first could play, and none of them were ever going to get it, because the part was written for a body that had never met nicotine before. That body doesn't exist anymore. It can't be rented back for twenty minutes at any price. The thing you've been chasing hasn't been on the shelf in years.

There's real relief in that if you let it land properly. Nothing is being taken from you now, because the thing worth having was gone long before you stopped, and every one after it was a search rather than a pleasure. You're not giving up a good thing. You're calling off a search. And the arriving feeling you honestly miss is still out there, in the places it came from originally, in mornings that start clear and people who know your name. Go get it where it actually lives.