CASE ENTRY
I stopped six weeks ago. Motivation, memory, the usual reasons that sound small until you notice how much of your day they'd been quietly running. Last night a friend came over without knowing any of this and lit up on my balcony like it was any other evening, because for them it was. I sat there smelling it, feeling the old itch, the logic already forming: I'm already around it, what difference would it make. I didn't ask. Instead I went inside and did dishes, put a wall and some running water between me and the decision. It worked. Afterward I felt proud of that, briefly, and then annoyed underneath the pride, because it was my apartment and I was the one who left the room. I keep circling the idea that I should just tell my friend not to smoke around me for a while, say it plainly, make it a rule instead of a private negotiation with myself conducted over a sink full of dishes. But I haven't said it yet. I don't know if the annoyance is at my friend, or at the six weeks, or at having to manage something that used to require no management at all.

DEPARTMENT OBSERVATION
The pattern here is a boundary not yet misread as attack, only because it has not yet been stated; the risk under observation is that it will be. What is within control: naming the need directly to the friend. What is not within control: whether the friend experiences that naming as reasonable or as accusation, and whether the itch itself diminishes on any predictable schedule. The dishes were not avoidance. They were the boundary, enacted before it had words.

A QUESTION FOR THE RECORD
What would it cost you if your friend heard the request and simply forgot, the very next time, without meaning anything by it?