As I wind my chains over my hand, I think of you. I can almost see you: just 19, a closed fist of a girl, a Newport nesting between your fingers. Having lit up for the first time just 6 months ago, you're already violently in love with your slim white cylinders. They warm you like tiny campfires. Life would be so cold and dark without them.

Give yourself a few decades. Eventually, you see the light — and I don't mean the one at the end of a mini Bic. You want to quit smoking. You're sick of worrying about the tumor you know might be growing at this very second in one smoke-scarred lung, tired of groveling to strangers who sneer and flap their hand as you light up and blow your smoke toward the ceiling, ashamed that one part of you smokes to keep thin, pissed beyond words that you stand in the rain/snow/cold to indulge a behavior that could very well kill you. You have everything going for you — beautiful son, loving husband and family, successful career, money in the bank. You want to live. Plus, you'll look like shit in an oxygen tent.

Smoking becomes a metaphorical chain around your ankle, binding you not just to an early death from lung cancer, but to puffy eyes, skin the color of oatmeal, and tiny vertical lines around your lips that make you look as if you've spent your life whistling, a skill you've never actually mastered. So on a bleak November morning 20 years later, you decide to make a last-ditch, desperate bid to break your pack-a-day habit. You turn over your 7-year-old son, Daniel, to your ex-husband, Matt, for a week — and lock yourself to your dining room radiator. That's right. You literally chain yourself to a hunk of hot metal for 7 full days of cold-turkey agony.

Your second husband, John, pronounces you demented. To which you reply, "Yes, but brilliantly so." Then you implement Lockdown, as you call your voluntary house arrest. It goes like this:

1. Schedule week's vacation from job as editor, where you produce books about the benefits of a healthy diet and moderate exercise.
2. Go to Home Depot. Purchase 72 feet of thick, shiny, brushed nickel chainand two heavy-duty combination locks.
3. Force long-suffering husband to lock one end of chain around left ankle and fasten the other end around radiator in dining room each morning before he leaves for work.
4. Sleep. Weep. Stare into space. Call John to complain of boredom. Wander from room to room, rattling like Marley's ghost as you white-knuckle cravings. Watch Lifetime movies and Maury Povich until you want to empty a .44-caliber handgun into the TV, Elvis style.
5. Wonder how it came to this.

On the surface, Lockdown's logic seems obvious: You're out of options. You've tried everything to quit. Zyban. Nicotine gum. Nicotine patches the color of old-lady support hose, which — when peeled from your upper arm or buttock — leave large, itchy welts. Tearful, eyes-on-the-ceiling, knees-on-the-floor prayers asking God to touch his thumb to your forehead and allow you to throw down your cigarettes like a crutch (it's a miracle!). But pharmaceuticals and prayer fail you, leaving you to pin your hopes on 72 feet of chain purchased off the roll for 69 cents a foot. Why become a chain gang of one? Because you are — and forever will be — a drama queen. And, more to the point, you're not screwing around anymore. What resolve cannot accomplish, dammit, cold steel can.

Of course, there are deeper reasons for your current predicament. Let me explain as I shuffle my way to the loo. (When you're fettered by a 40-pound chain, the simple act of peeing becomes a test of endurance.) At 33, married 6 months to Matt, you get pregnant. You quit smoking, of course; you're not a monster. But less than a year after Daniel's birth, you're back on the sticks. At 34, guilt-ridden, you plunk him in his car seat, roll down the window, and light up. At 36, you sneak out of his third birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese's, closing your eyes as the nicotine ignites your brain like a Fourth of July sparkler. At 39, you puff apologetically at his soccer games under other mothers' accusing eyes. At 40, you find yourself in this very room — unshowered, your mood as sour as your skin, your glasses askew on the bridge of your oily nose — shackled like a lunatic at Bedlam.

Listen to the chain clank between the fits of weeping, 3-hour naps, and Maury's unending paternity tests. Each link is a story about how cigarettes pulled you in. They all sound pretty much the same: You felt like an outsider. You didn't understand that comfort is self-generated, like body heat, so you settled for the next best thing: the anesthesia of smoke. One link is your childhood — your young mother, AWOL father, then stepfather and new baby brother. You saw yourself as an intruder, a leftover. You rejected them before they could reject you. Another link, your troubled adolescence — a budding alcoholic, you stole Dad's liquor and squirreled it away in old condiment bottles. (Remember the taste of ketchup-flavored vodka and gin with the faintest hint of Italian dressing?) Over the next 8 years, you drank enough vodka tonics to fill a Jacuzzi and slept with more losers than Tara Reid. Eventually, you quit drinking and found God. No Bibles, no brimstone. Your Supreme Being is more like Kurt Vonnegut, a longtime aficionado of Pall Malls. Through it all, cigarettes were your only constant. They were your friends, your protectors, and your only reliable source of comfort.

Lying on the couch, the chain curled at my feet like a faithful dog, I can almost smell your Newport. The smoker in me whispers: Screw this. Just dig through the trash, find your last cigarette, and dry it in the oven on a piece of aluminum foil. Then turn on the stove, bend to the heated front coil with the butt in your mouth, and puff until it catches. Go on — singe a lock of your hair in the process, as you always do. Enjoy the aroma of burnt hair mingling with the delicious odor of smoke. Maybe I would, if John hadn't taken out the garbage. I'm not desperate enough to rattle out the door in my frumpy robe like an escaped sex slave. Well, not yet.

But another part of me — the strongest, wisest, best part — says no. I want to live. Deep down, so do you, an epiphany you'll experience 20 years from now, after approximately 153,000 cigarettes. I want to live to see Daniel grow up. Grow old with my husband, so that we can bicker in rocking chairs and discuss our bowels. Savor every minute of a life that, I assure you, will be both frustrating and indescribably lovely. That is why, in 20 years, you commit the most sensible act of your life: You chain yourself to a radiator. Of course you know this strange but noble experiment could end in failure, as your other attempts have. Even so, you won't forget Lockdown's ultimate lesson: We forge our own chains, and it's up to us to break them.

Six weeks after Lockdown, Julia Hansen resumed smoking. But she quit again in early 2005 — without shackles — and hasn't lit up since. Her memoir, A Life in Smoke, is out this month.