It’s 5 a.m., and I’m wide awake. I shouldn’t be - I still have an hour of hard-earned sleep before the cell phone on my pillow will play the Red Hot Chili Peppers and coax me awake to meet the day. I struggle to hold onto the hour I have left. I’m warm, burrowed deep under my black comforter. It’s calm and dark in my room. And it should be silent. I jam my pillow harder over my ears, hoping for quiet. But through the pillow, I can still hear the wet, hacking cough coming from the opposite end of the house - the cough I wake up to every morning. The cough that comes from 30 years of smoking.

I first noticed it when I was six. I’d always been told, “Don’t touch this. Don’t touch that,” and up to that point, I was more interested in playing with my Barbies than questioning my parents. I knew that if I touched Mommy and Daddy’s cigarettes, I’d get in trouble. Good enough for my six-year-old state of mind.

Then I hit first grade, and with that came some new and amazing things. Like visits from the school counselor and my first drug and alcohol lectures: “Don’t do drugs. Don’t drink alcohol. Don’t talk to strangers!” I saw the logic of all of these things - drugs, alcohol, and strangers in vans waving candy around could hurt me, so I had to stay away. Simple. Got it.

Only, under the big red “X” on the poster urging me not to do drugs was something I saw dangling from my parents’ fingers every day. Something I had been warned not to touch all my life. A lit cigarette.

Tobacco kills. Mr. Whitlow, my counselor, said so. Why would my parents do something that could kill them? I was shocked, confused, and scared. My first-grade mind was unequipped to handle the myriad emotions. Here began my zero tolerance for smoking.

Seventy-nine percent of Americans are addicted to cigarettes or smoke regularly. I wonder if any of them ever had recurring nightmares featuring dark, smoke-filled rooms and the death of their parents. Did they spare a thought for those around them, inhaling the smoke? Did they think about what was in a cigarette - arsenic, benzene, ammonia, carbon monoxide?

I have a “No Smoking” sign posted on my bedroom door. I finally got over the phase where I posted them on every available surface in my house. I refuse, with every bit of stubbornness I possess, to be around anyone who’s smoking. I see smoking as an utter lack of respect, a “let me blow arsenic-enriched smoke in your face” sort of thing. I continuously wash my clothes to try to remove the smoky smell I relate with death. But it never seems to fade. The fact that my parents smoke will always keep me from respecting them as much as I’d like to. Every time my sister erupts in a king-sized asthma attack, I lose respect for them with every wheezing gasp for air.

And it scares me. I don’t want to be 25 and burying my parents. I don’t want to toss that first handful of soil onto their coffins, thinking, I told you so.

I don’t want to see a friend talking through a hole in his or her throat and think, I told you so.

And I don’t want to be lying in a hospital, one of over 440,000 people suffering from second-hand smoke-related illness, thinking, I told you so.