What happens when the haze becomes your home?
When the only comfort comes from clouds that choke and burn?
Where clarity hurts more than the blur, and silence is softer than sound?
There was once a girl who hated the haze. She would wrinkle her nose, wave her hands wildly in the air to keep it away. The buds of ash that littered the street disgusted her, and she kicked them off the cobblestone with disdain. She swore she’d never end up like them—the ones who leaned on smoke to get by, who couldn’t live without a lighter in their pockets and a haze in their lungs.
But somewhere along the way, she stepped inside.
At first, it was a temporary escape. A curiosity, a rebellion, a coping mechanism she swore was just for now. The first inhale made her cough, her body rejected it—but it numbed something inside. The ache dulled, the noise softened. The haze didn’t judge. The haze didn’t yell. It was quiet in there, quiet enough to stop the spinning in her head.
That quiet became addictive.
I watched her change. Slowly, at first—like autumn leaves falling one by one. Her laugh had less color, her eyes less fire. Her shoulders began to sag under the weight she never shared. She used to wear perfumes that smelled like citrus and books. Now, she smelled like ash and empty.
She coughed more. Shivered more. Shrunk into herself. I watched her fingers tremble as they reached for another bud, and when she lit it up, her smile returned—not the bright, toothy grin from before, but a soft, almost reverent one. A smile that said, This is all I have left.
There was a day I saw her stare at the smoke, eyes fixed on the grey tendrils like they were telling her a secret. And in that moment, I realized the thing she feared most wasn’t the health warnings, or the people judging her, or even the thought of dying slowly. It was the idea of losing that one crutch that kept her world from collapsing.
How do you ask someone to trade their only comfort for a life that’s supposed to be “comfortable”?
The haze wasn’t about the high. It was about the escape. It gave her space from expectations, from pain, from the gnawing loneliness that no one else could see. And so she made a home of it. A home that hugged her with poison arms, that welcomed her into a warm, slow destruction. And she accepted the terms.
I watched her live one staggered breath at a time.
Until the breath ran out.
She blew her life away—not in a dramatic blaze, but in quiet, smoky rings that dissolved into the air like she was never here to begin with.
The world went on.
The haze lingered for a while longer.
And then it, too, disappeared.
People often ask what addiction looks like. Some say it’s dirty needles or cracked mirrors. But sometimes, it looks like a smile. A quiet girl on a park bench. A slow inhale. A borrowed breath. The scent of burned buds. The memory of a life that chose haze over healing because healing was never offered as a real option.
The girl who used to run from the smoke now sleeps in its arms. And somewhere deep in that haze, a new girl walks by with a wrinkled nose. She kicks the buds off the stone. She swears she’ll never end up like them.
I hope she doesn’t.
But if she does, I hope someone sees her.