A cigarette and a half

The static of the day seemed to fuzz everything around me. So in my form of protest for the overly rushed day I made a sharp right from the footpath and parked myself on wooden bench after letting my 3 kilo bag of everything fall abruptly with a thud at my feet. My spine quickly forgot ideal postures and sighed in the weight of the day sagging to my left, with my head cocked likewise. I checked my watched with minimal movement and as my eyes left the ticking hands, they came upon the young lady sitting on the root of a thick and stocky tree. She saw me see her and we both looked elsewhere. But my eyes strayed again to the stranger sitting a little left off being directly opposite me 2 metres away. She held a cigarette lightly between her index and thumb and sucked from it every 12 seconds. I couldn't seem to break my trance because her movement was hypnotising me. Her addiction to the smoke made me long for a relief in my own hustle and bustle. The smoke seemed to dance in slow motion, allowing capture into the stranger's tight lips and then falling in smooth distortion out of a cave of darkness, beckoning me to follow. It was probably a whole 34 seconds that I pretended I was minding my own business and not being fascinated in the slightest by the smoke and its way of curling sofisticatedly around the young lady's well defined stature.

Then, as the shrunk white stick gave her one last satisfying heave, she dropped it and stepped on it and then, to my amusement, whipped out another. She looked at me and placed the new cigarette between her two pursed lips, fitted her hands in her jacket pockets and stood up and walked towards me, opposing the light resistance of wind and the leaves it threw at her. She nodded to the space beside me and I shock my head in reply. She sat down beside me and took her hands out of her pockets, retrieving also a scratched zippo. And in a 3 second continuous motion, she flicked out a flame and lit the new cigarette within a protective cupped hand before clamping the flame shut. She sucked long from the new one and removed it from her mouth, pausing for 4 seconds before offering me her source of comfort. I return a grateful smirk and receive the offer. My fingers numbly explored the brittle stick as the dilemma of whether to investigate the temporal comfort or not turned restlessly in my mind. So she broke my silence and spoke.

"You probably don't want to get started on one of those," her voice travelled slowly, protruding my thoughts. I look up with a hint of confusion and then resolve. "though your first won't get you hooked, your first five within a week will."
"I'll take your word for it." I replied as I sighed out my first mouthful of thin, wispy grey. Then second, and third. "I have 4 and a half til addiction then, hey?" I laugh while returning the half used comfort stick.

...

The ride home was smooth and without hiccups. But for the rest of the evening I could not separate the wretched aftertaste from my tortured taste buds.

I decided it was not the cigarette that was comforting that day, but the young lady who offered it in the kindest gesture that echoed "we're very much related, here, take my advice". Ahh, the people do only what they know, even if it doesn't work. We exchanged contacts and keep in touch every once in a while, turns out she's a reformed schizophrenic and good company.