Nicotine

There was a woman who smoked. Smoke was an escape, an interval of time carved out from its magnanimous continuity, for her and her alone. Often drowned in wisps of the white cloud, she would pick up pieces of reality between her fingers, neatly and throw them, as far as she could. If they found their way back to her again, it was time to light another one. Long bouts of such vague hours, spent in between consciousness and unconsciousness filled up phases of her nights. The woman who smoked.

As the nicotine filled her nostrils and lungs, flowed through her blood for a while, the nerves in her head went off to snooze. An artificial high of sorts dictated her thoughts. Though sometimes she cried too, she laughed hysterically, inhaled and exhaled. Looked back at the past, looked down at the past, mocked at it thick-skinned, unaffected, immune.

When overwhelmed, like said, she cried. Drops of tears, scanty though, wet her lashes and slipped out when she closed her eyelids. With every such drop removed from her conscious were stashes of regret, failure, wrongdoing, like undone. And the woman sighed in relief, short-lived though.

This was her one chance to take control of the things that had for long been evading. One chance to renounce all imposed myths of inferiority. Emerging from behind the shadows, and flying away like an angel. She laughed, like mad this time, lighting the next from the present, trying to stretch her escape into deeper hours of the night. Not letting any truth loiter around her being for a radius mile-wide.