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Smoke lifts like a plume into the night air. It reminds Marlow of her mother who would more often than not have a cigarette between her thin fingers, and everything about her seemed so charming as she put the filter to her ruby lips. Marlow thinks she must look like the antithesis of her mother; hunched over on the wicker chair by the window, letting ash fall to the sill, and pressing the filter between her chapped lips hungrily. There's a kind of unattractive desperation that she carries. The cigarettes ease her mind to silence and gives her shaking hands something to do. Her mother always said that desperation, no matter the form, was unbecoming.
But Marlow thought that feelings and desires weren't meant to be restrained, even the ugly ones that were hard to bear. So she never held back with anything. It's why she loved so fiercely, acted so readily, and lamented so woefully. She felt everything all at once—it was something that drew people to her, that so much life could exist in one person. But these days she pales in comparison to what she once was. There's something to be said for change and the way that people grow, but this change is disturbing in nature. This is a slow decay—subconscious collapse that has left nothing but ruins, stripped her bare and revealed the most grisly parts of her.
This decay leaves casualties, and Marlow is not sure she can ever get back to the place she used to be.
There's a soft knock on the thin door. One and two. It sounds like an echo and Marlow feels her room stretching—the door slipping further and further away as the gap between them grows. She can do nothing but watch as an abyss starts to form and the faint call of her name sounds distant, like a whisper into a great expanse. And then the door creaks open and everything is as it was. Jessie enters and takes six paces to reach Marlow. She looks up at the girl through straw-like strands of flat hair—fingers still gripped around a shrinking cigarette and eyes that are sunken in like two peach pits. Jessie tucks the loose strands of hair behind Marlow's ear, smiling softly when she sees how the girl leans into her touch, craving the gentleness that comes with it.
Marlow puts the cigarette butt out against the window sill. Jessie doesn't like the smell of cigarettes, though she's accepted the fact that Marlow's scent is perpetually riddled with the smell of nicotine. It isn't surprising with the way that she sucks on the filter as though she's a man starved.
Jessie waves the residual smoke away from her calmly, Marlow mimicking the movements though she drops her hand before the plume is fully dissipated.
"How was the grief counseling?" She asks eagerly, a hopeful look plastered on her pretty face. Marlow thinks this is why Jessie makes such an excellent teacher. She used to mockingly call her Miss Covey, but she also used to call her a saint for being able to put up with kids all day. Jessie was just the kind of person who had an endless supply of patience and could see the good in everything, no matter what ugliness shrouded it. After a moment of Marlow not answering, she asks, "You went, didn't you?"
