The one you would have to hide

Price it properly before you decide anything, because the number being quoted is not the real one. The offer looks like a single item. One cigarette, one time, a few minutes, back to normal after. But if you took it tonight, you already know what tomorrow would ask of you, and it is not a few minutes. You would have to start hiding again, and the hiding was never printed anywhere on the tag.

You remember that job. The cover story you have to keep straight. Checking your clothes and your hands before you walk into a room. The cracked window, the timing worked out in advance, the small lie you maintain because a bigger one is standing behind it. And the worst of it, the flinch when someone who is proud of you asks how it is going, and you have to answer with your face. The double life is unpaid work and it never gets a day off.

That is the actual bill, and it is charged in a currency you have already spent years of. Hiding costs attention. It takes up the back of your mind permanently, in every room, at every family thing, on every drive home, running quietly under whatever else you were doing. It is probably some of the tiredness you blamed on other things. And what it bought was a handful of minutes that were not even especially good. The math was never close.

So set the two things side by side right now, while the urge is loud enough to make you concentrate. On one side, ten minutes. On the other, the whole apparatus back. Written down like that, nobody takes the trade. Thank God you are on the side of this where there is no story about yourself to manage. Tonight you go to bed with nothing to keep track of, and that is worth more than what is on the table.