Inspired by Cigarette Daydreams by Cage the Elephant.

It felt like she’d just slipped through my grasp. Like smoke, she ran through my fingers and drifted away on the wind, and I was left standing, gazing dumbly at the air where she had once been. 

   Every time I shut my eyes I see the back of her one more time. 

   Music blared into the night, and the smell of seventeen hung thickly in the air. One of us was never meant to be there, though I couldn’t say who. I counted every step to the door, noted every crack in the plaster, memorized every detail of every face that I passed inside, tucking them away for later, as if some part of me knew I would be scanning this memory every night thereafter for some hidden explanation.

   Someone bumped into me, sloshing beer down my front. He apologized with slurred speech. Sparing him a glance, I noticed that his clothes were glaringly mismatched, his trousers too small and his shirt too large. He offered me a goofy grin for my soiled front. I nodded and stored him away in my brain. The beer-smell was pungent, and I recentered myself along that smell, allowing it to pull me through the crowd, and up the stairs to the balcony. A handful of people stood, clustered by the large windows, on either end of the railing, but she stood alone in the center, back to me, leaning over the railing like a queen holding court. 

   Between her vibrant clothes and the shock of her hair, her skin was practically translucent by comparison. One strap of her dress had dropped and it hung over her elbow like a fallen soldier. None of her subjects seemed to notice her, yet to me, she seemed the streak of color in a painting of grey.

   A single tendril of smoke curled upward from her profile.

   A few looked up as the balcony door snapped shut behind me, but none spoke to me and she did not move. Only as I stood behind and arced an arm around her shoulders to pluck the cigarette dangling from her lips, did she turn to look at me. Her nose was scrunched in annoyance, but if she was surprised to see me, it didn’t show. Her eyes, bright and shining with malignity, stared unflinchingly into my own, and for a moment I was frozen, cigarette suspended from my fingers as I forgot what I was supposed to do with it.

   “May I?” I said breathlessly, gesturing with the cigarette. Her mouth opened and closed, soundlessly.

   “Keep it.” she said suddenly as she shoved past me, slamming the balcony door behind her. A few heads raised as this unfolded. For an instant time appeared to slow. The stars above me stretched into amorphous streaks, and the bass leaking from the house pulsated in painful heartbeats, close to flatline. The hand that lifted the cigarette to my lips was labored. I took a deep drag, waking up as the nicotine hit my bloodstream, then flung the cigarette over the railing and darted back into the house.

   My eyes immediately went to the staircase as a red blur flashed down it. She stopped for a moment at the base of the stairs, looking back to see if I’d followed her, and we locked eyes.  In that split-second, her face was possessed by a look of such grief that, even at this distance, I felt it shoot clean through me and nail my heart to the wall. 

   Then, she disappeared into the crowd.