Part I

She'd grown accustomed to the sights and sounds and smells of the alleyway leading to her apartment--so much so that she thought nothing of them as she found that narrow opening between the two buildings--the kind so slim you'd need someone to point it out before you'd know it was there. The smell of the bakery mixing with the coffee shop below, the familiar grating of gravel beneath her feet, the clanging of pans from the restaurant next-door--all filled her with a familiarity akin to neglect. Only when she'd been gone for a few days and come back did she notice them, as if their absence had somehow made them more pronounced. The acclimatization with the scene left her listless, languid matched with the lull and ease of her day, always the same. 

Today walking through the alley, she passed the open door of the coffee shop's very back room, the one only regulars knew existed. Through the darkness of the back room, silent tendrils of  smoke whispered out to her, tugging her clothes and pushing the small of her back towards the open door. Instantly her throat burned and her eyes misted with Pavlovian memory. Years along, she'd never forgotten that smell--the way muscles remember how to form words or preserve posture. Standing shaded against the brick wall her breath drew heavy and reluctant as her conscious memory joined her hidden one.

She'd never liked a man with a propensity for a pipe. Then again, she'd never known too many men who had such a one. When she did, however, the vehemency with which she abhorred burned her like a hell within her heart. She supposed it still did; but she couldn't walk away from the smell of the pipe seducing her through the open door, settling itself in the crevices of her gray-matter, masochistically burning her esophagus. 

It was a finer tobacco--this she discerned and this she preferred. It wasn't the cheap cherry-infused sort that smelled of cough syrup and latex, it contained none of the false sweetness of  vanilla bean, or the foppishness of rosehip. No, this tobacco was finer than that--this tobacco carried a story in it's smoke, like the aromas caught in the droplets of a fog; it's history so deep, one could have divined the fates of nations down to dates in its ashes. Every puff was a paragraph from its story--the steel that broke the soil, the man who planted the seed, the hand that plucked its leaves--each puff another tale to sustain a princess hoping tonight wouldn't be her last in this Arabian court. It reminisced about its old friend the bowl and gave praises to the bend while delighting fondly in its schoolmate the stem. 

Yet that is not why she stopped, tethered to the product of disintegration's chaos. She did not stop because of the song it sang of itself, but because of the song it played within her--note by note, slowly now. Its fingers dusted off books hiding in the shelves of  her bones. It found old photographs in the trunk of her attic mind. It unearthed old letters stuffed away in the pockets of her heart. The dark, woodsy, rich scent held out its arm like the perfect gentleman it was and gave her a dashing, gentle smile before proposing a saunter by the lake, its ripples forming new memory-scenes across its surface.