Addiction

She stood at her balcony, the lights of the city sprawling before her.  While cars continued on their journey with tired drivers making their way home before midnight approached, she put a cigarette to her lips and lit it. As she exhaled, the smoke from her mouth drifted soullessly into the night sky.

She looked with sadness at the lifeless herbs and flowers wilting in the baskets hanging from her balcony. Just a few weeks before they had blossomed in the summer sun, signifying happier, carefree days.  The cold chill of the October night made her crave for those days, yearning for their return.

Through the stillness of the night, she heard a siren in the distance and caught the flashing blue lights of a police car. Life carried on she thought as she took another drag of her cigarette. The solitude of her balcony at midnight was strangely comforting, more so than the cigarette that was poised between her fingers. From here, she could envelope herself in the city around her and acknowledge the insignificance of her own sorrow against the vastness of the world around her.

Tears pricked the back of her eyes, threatening to betray her bravado. She forced them back, determined not to be beaten by the specks of her grief. The clocktower chimed midnight. That was it, she thought, it wouldn’t chime again until dawn when the world would be awake once more.

As she followed the trail of her smoke she chastised herself for returning to this dark and tortuous place. She had spent months overcoming her addiction. The addiction had overpowered her entre being for years and turning her back on it had been excruciating. She avoided social events at first. She couldn’t face the laughter and frivolity expressed by people she deemed unworthy of contentment. They were always full of pity for people like her. People whose lives constantly spiralled from one tragedy to the next.

But her bitterness passed with surprising ease as she ingratiated herself with these strangers. She moved fluidly from outsider to the heart of the party and her laughter could be heard above everybody else’s. Though the strangers initially considered her with caution, unfamiliar with such a strange, lost soul, their intrigue overruled and they soon sought her out, eager for another fix of her infectiousness.

Her addiction gradually waned as she distracted herself with a glittering social calendar, yet it still tortured her sub-conscious, refusing to diminish completely. She would experience the occasional flash of longing, almost a physical ache that needed nursing. But in those glorious sunny days, she was able to ignore the longing and instead immerse herself in these strangers and the excitement they offered.

The looming winter awaited her however. Like an assassin waiting for his prey, it knew that the cold solitary nights would force her to surrender to the attraction she had fought so hard to resist. With a final drag of her cigarette, she chided herself for not being stronger, for allowing herself to relent so listlessly. As she watched the end of the cigarette spiral to the ground beneath her, she told herself that was the final time. He would not break her heart again.