I Walk the Line ♤ (gxg)

prologue

It was a bad habit.

Amongst many others, she had the bad habit of smoking cigarettes. She did not know why she kept smoking them. She could have easily tossed the pack of Marlboro 100's into the trashcan, along with her green transparent lighter, and felt no need to dig through the crumpled-up homework papers to retrieve the bad habit again. She did not quite like the lingering coat of musk that they left on her clothes after each smoke session. The bad habit, she felt, was seemingly written across her forehead, visible to each passing person with a decent olfactory system. French vanilla perfume never failed to halfway cover the scent. She wondered if those who knew her knew her scent as that—cigarettes and French vanilla.

Everyone had a scent, she reflected to herself as she felt the thick smoke fill her lungs until they burned and then hastily flee from between her chapped lips, almost as desperate for a sense of freedom as she was. Whether by perfume or their bad habits, everyone, no matter if they felt like the most unimportant person in the world, automatically earned some sort of significance at the very second of their birth—a scent.

She remembered her scent. It seemed to physically verify her tangible aura. Her scent was cherry Coke and cigarettes. The latter one was passed onto her, especially after she had been handed her first cigarette only three months ago. Three months was all it took for her to develop that bad habit, but it was not the first nor the only one she developed in that period of time.

Now she laid on the roof where she had smoked her first cigarette three months ago, and she glanced over at the full can of cherry Coke sitting on the concrete next to her, almost as if it were mocking her. A dull ache formed in her heart, a hollow, resounding ache that penetrated her deepest core. A sudden burning sensation in her fingers made her realize that the cigarette was burned to its very end, and maybe so was she.

♠️