The Last Cigarette

The rain trickles down the side of your face. Water spots litter the framed glass windows held in front of your face. Giving you clarity; giving you the hindsight that only stained memories could ever retell. Your eyes close as a plume of smoke escapes from your dirtied lungs. From the beaten, black,and bruised muscle that powered your soul, the poison tries to leave your veins into the cold wet air. Instead, it lingers. You're addicted. The pain, the everlasting longing for sweet release. For just one more taste on your lips.

It takes you back to when you were a child. Maybe whenever your mother dropped you off at the library on a Saturday morning in order to envelope yourself in a world of imagination, far from the treacherous terrors and forboding miseries that were to lie ahead. You'd read, and read. And escape, and escape. Like the doors of heaven opened up and a blinding light escaped as it called for your name, begged for you to turn the knob and check what lies around the corner. But, curiousity was a stranger in an unmarked van. When you'd return from a world of fantasy, a world free from dreary of the black and white monotony, you'd return to a world of colour that was quickly fading into the night. What sunlight remained seemed to hover over your tiny vessel and warmed your still innocent senses. You'd sit and wait for your mother to return. Sitting on the brick fence of a garden that laid before the library. Spring was in the air. Life was new again.

A small Field Skipper butterfly rests on the daisies littering the quiet greenery with your books about the Universe and all the unanswered questions inside your heart and mind clutched in your hand. It mesmerizes you. You've never seen anything as quiet, calm but extraordinarily extravagant at the same time. Knowing that any slightly agressive movement would scare the specimen away, you work your way in slowly. You drop your books to the floor slowly as you bend down to level yourself with the picture perfect display of raw nature. Your fingers shape to a pincher as your press your fingertips against the wings, restricting movement. It struggles, and you try to end it's suffering quickly by placing it in the palm of your other hand as you begin to cup your prison around it's purity.

It flutters about inside its dark residence, but soon it tires of it's unattainable escape, and it becomes complacent inside of it's new hovel. And that's when you begin to release your grip and expose the blessed wonder back into its necessity. There were times when it would escape in a flurry of what seemed like pixie dust, catching your eye as it glistens against the sun's shining rays. Then there were times when it lay still in your palm, with its probiscis prodding away at your flesh, inquiring at your alien make up. You are not the same. It has realized that much. Sometimes, it would stay long enough for you to come face to face with such an eloquent beast. Completely simple, but wholly misunderstood at the same time. And those same rays that documented the escape of others, soon began to light up the luminescent residue left on your hands as it began to walk slowly around, increasing its interest in you.

But it always ends the same when it leaves, vanishing and never to be seen again. Migrating and mixing, living and leaving. And it was time to let go. It was a lesson on letting go. The echo of thunder suddenly brings you back. You wipe the water from your cheek and another sigh of relief bellows into the watery night. Your hands are free now. No longer stained with the smell of the drug that held onto your heart for so long. This is the lesson -- and we never look back.

Author's notes:
- This is not about cigarettes
- Written listening to Cecil Otter - Sufficiently Breathless, off of his album, Rebel Yellow

www.myspace.com/cecilotter80 - www.doomtree.net - www.strangefamous.com