Chasing

                                    

She was sniffing the coolness in the air, with the cigarette in her hand. Was it even possible to sniff the coolness in the air. She was smoking, for god's sake! Forget it. She told herself. This habit is not washing off too quickly. She's scratched the most delicate part of her senses and there's no way she can bring back the polish again. No way. At all. Her legs idly moving in constant rhythm to each other.

    One more puff, and out again.

Yes, it has become a daily thing. Could she not retreat. She was repulsed   by herself. By this version of herself that she'd become. The one that didn't even exist. But, it did. It did exist. She looked down at her own hands. They looked pretty once upon a time.. But why didn't they now? To an ordinary person they still would, maybe. But to her, they had been scarred. Scarred with unfathomable days and months that had brought her here. She was sore from inside. And no book was to help her escape this. No night's high could make her omit the feelings for a lifetime.

And yet she had such conversations daily. Such moments of self-realisation where she sought to find a way to pull her put of this numb guilt. And when she was almost there, she would be pushed back to square one just like all the other times because that coward within her would shriek, ''You fell down while climbing the mountain once, how will you climb back up again with the wounds still fresh?''.

She was moving around, floating to lands wherever, sometimes in her dreams. And it was beauty. Absolute perfection. Here, she saw everything with different eyes. Eyes that were not rotting from her heart. Heart? It's a body organ. Its work is to pump blood. Yeah, she's a science kid. Still, she would creep into the church sometimes and confess. Because it would lighten her heart.

She coughed. Lighten the heart? If only there was a theory proving that no such equation existed.

Today she was going to try harder. She was going to fight with herself. Why today? She doesn't know. She never will. Ripping through the covers that instilled darkness in her bubble, she dropped the cigarette stub. And looked behind at the door. The door she was going to swing open and fall, if that's what it would cost to reach out and stand under the sun. Too much had been charred away. Too much.

We all have habits we would rather not. It's about taking that 'rather not' and respecting it. If that's how you feel, then don't let the otherwise overwhelm you.