Smoking in Windows

 I stood at the window in my studio and slid the locks open. With a thrill I pushed the window open and felt the cold January air bite my skin. I lowered myself to perch on the sill, pulled my droopy cardigan closer around me as I fished a clove cigarette from the barely smoked pack, and lit it with  the excited abandon of a 38 year old mother of three. The incense burning on the shelf near by swirled thickly, filling the room overbearingly. None escaped the open window. Instead, the draft pulled frosty air into the room and I immediately questioned my spontaneous, deviant, indulgence. Fuck it. We've come too far. 

I lit the cigarette and took a long drag, watching the smoke from the lit ember immediately pull into the room. This plan was obviously built on romantic images from movies, of some needy or even satisfied soul stealing a moment of solitude and waiving away the surgeon general's warning as they lived in the moment and indulged a destructive act of abandon. I felt the buzzy high as I blew out plumes of smoke and watched as they returned full into my face and back into the room, threatening this most secret act. Should I have fortified the gap at the bottom of the studio door with a towel? Would the smell be overpowered by the nag champra or would the smoky odor reach my children?

 All small acts of indulgence come with a cost, isn't that the lesson? Where would this fall on risk taking behavior? Would my therapist congratulate me on trusting myself to make a calculated risk or would she clear her throat, pausing to prepare me to hear how the integrity of my choices were declining, as opposed to improving?