It was a jazzy blues kind of night. My thoughts and I sat alone. A sliver of smoke curled around my fingers before climbing onto another memory. Orange, purple, black. Fire, smoke, nothing. Inhale, exhale, breath. (She was sleeping, oblivious to the coming morning when an empty space will replace me, when my desire to go will clutch at her throat, seep into her pores.) It's cold here.
People feel trapped, I thought, only when they think there are other options. How long can people be delusional? All their lives? The thought depressed me. All that I left behind was supposed to be dead weight; but now, in the middle of a no-name town tucked away in forgotten corner of the world, I thought about those people: their faces, eyes and mouths. I started to count the days and years I had lost, thinking I could endure by doing what was right, assuming that the right thing was obvious. Painfully so.