It was a heavenly time. In the mid-to-late-’80s, non-chain liquor stores would sell to my baby face. Evanston Township High School even had a luxurious smoking courtyard for us teenagers. So easy to be goth all winter!

When I see teenagers like the one I was, I want to make a senior citizen’s arrest.

I strode through the end of my high school years in a smoke bubble, insulated from the horrors of emotion and exertion. Smoking is one of the perfect solutions to being a teenager, right up there with Manic Panic hair dye and murder. Teachers and counselors must have felt like the Hubble telescope, peering across a vast gulf at a gaseous planet. My exterior was an opaque blue-gray swirl of carbon monoxide. No one could even glimpse the human trash can within.

Somehow I forgot to apply to college. I happily became a teenage bartender instead. Finally, a job where you could smoke all day.

My friend John remembers the first time he saw me: I was 18, sitting in the back seat of the Market Street bus in San Francisco, smoking out the window. He was disturbed. That was precisely what I wanted. I wanted to be off-putting, a cascade of macho and feminine, a vibrating range of all extremes. Cigarettes were just another middle finger.

At night I’d sit with my roommate Philo at our little yellow Formica kitchen table, listening to records, and we’d smoke endlessly, until it was time to worry about the sun coming up.

Doesn’t that sound dreamy still? You could do that then in San Francisco; a bedroom in a Castro Victorian was $300 a month. (Couldn’t you die, Silicon Valley bros? Please do.)

I went from Marlboros to Camels to Camel Wides to Parliaments to my delicious mainstay, Winston Lights. They were so macho. They made me a hotter dude. Winstons are aggressively rural, a Camaro dashboard cigarette, a soft pack from the dusty trailer park. Even I wanted to have sex with me, and I hated myself!

But I was just a horny lovesick brand slave, like any Lanvin enthusiast or Coca-Cola chugger. Every devotion to a brand is eventually revealed to be a lie.

I never left a spinning class without smoking. I never left the subway without smoking. I went exactly one day without a cigarette: April 25, 1995, when I spent the night in jail, courtesy of a protest against Rudy Giuliani. I got out of jail and immediately bought some cigarettes. It was just like a scene they forgot to put in “Rent,” only boring and also kind of sad.

I smoldered on. I smoked on my East Village roof while watching the World Trade Center burn. But I was fine. I could still easily and enthusiastically practice cardio-intensive activities such as terror sex. I could run up three flights of stairs in the event of a subway station panic attack or during that whole year that I refused to use elevators.

Where were the consequences from doing the worst thing on earth? My T-zone never dried into a baseball mitt. I burned only one article of clothing — though it was a pair of jeans from that perfect moment between boot cut and superskinny, and now I’ll never have jeans that fit my calves properly again. I refused to keel over (uh, so far).

Humans quickly accustom themselves to terror looming. A plane crash would probably be scary only for like the first hour. After that, we’d start wondering when the snack cart is coming by.

But they call it a life expectancy, not a life certainty, and a daily question became: Was everyone just going to let me keep smoking? Didn’t anyone care?

My doctor told me I’d be fine if I quit before I was 40. I don’t actually know if he was a very good doctor.

Then 40 came speeding past like an express train, leaving me stranded and panting on the local track. The Daily Mail ran a surely totally accurate summary of research that said I’d be fine if I just quit by 44. That specificity made it sound like a final deadline. My exceedingly handsome and patient husband was now starting to lose patience, but I was losing my denial faster. The smoking party had ended and I was huddled out in the rain alone. “Smoker, party of one!” — something Carrie Bradshaw typed and deleted, probably.

And so shortly after midnight this New Year’s Eve, I left my 10 cigarettes on the lobby radiator on my way out of Max and Ari’s party, lit the 11th for good luck and smoked it out into the night. I tossed my lighter into a garbage can on the way home. It was not a moment of hope.

After a week, my eyeballs stopped sweating. After the first two months, my feelings tsunami subsided. Honestly, what had I been waiting for? Quitting smoking was simple. The secret, you see, is hidden in the phrase itself. You stop putting cigarettes in your mouth.

It’s like KonMari, except easy, because the only things you throw out are your cigarettes and your entire sense of self.

My friend Emily said she was happy for me, but wistful, too. The last smoker quitting seemed like another kind of gentrification. Now I’m gone, too, along with the gas stations and all the stores that aren’t 7-Eleven. But the emotional rent was just too high.

Quitting smoking is the khakis of existence. Quitting smoking is the Chipotle on St. Marks Place. I am totally not cool. I may as well be someone’s stupid Brooklyn dad. My hair is its natural color. Most days I’m just wearing whatever. I do yoga endlessly. What am I now?

But also? I feel like anything could happen. Unencumbered, naked and glassy, I feel perilously close to a dozen superfun midlife crises. I could move to anywhere before I even knew I had done so. Someone told me Belgrade is amazing right now, you guys.

Someday, if I’m lucky, I’ll get to smoke again. For now, all I have is the chip on my shoulder. At Equinox every day, surrounded by millennials sweating on their mats, I think about the old joke about Ginger Rogers. Just as she did everything that Fred Astaire did, except backward and in heels, I’m doing everything the young people are doing — except with lungs that smoked for 30 years. I’d like to see these pink-lunged kiddos try it.

Thing is, if I live long enough, my lungs may end up as conch-pink as theirs. Meanwhile, they should use caution when I’m around. Underneath all that smoke, it turns out, I’m a little jagged. Someone could easily get cut.