slow decay

I exhale, my breath-smoke spreading out in clouds, dissipating into nighttime air from the heights of my balcony. The air is made up of uncountable millions of pieces, fragments of smoke and plastic and influenza, mingled together, perpetually added to and subtracted from by every moving part of this world, all made permissible by dilution, all ignored in their insignificance. On this balcony I look over a city of several million people and I see nobody, only their vehicles, their homes, traces of their existence and activity. I am the only person in the world and I am smoking a cigarette I can put down but will not, on a balcony I can jump from, to my death, yet my feet stay firmly planted. My mind is locked into a terminal cycle of slow decay.
	My days are those of failure, and my nights, of reflection. My dysfunction is diurnal; in the sadness which comes after dusk I resolve towards betterment and yet refuse to acknowledge the perpetuity of my daytime stagnation or, rather, address it, and so my failures become the subject of my reflections, the reflections cement failure as the only possibility: the only result that may stem from any action. This night will not be any different. The chill in the breeze will force me inside eventually, and I will sleep unsoundly to prepare for another day, where my slightest actions seem to take the greatest amounts of effort, where breathing is a chore and anything past survival is out of the question. 
	There is no rationale for my actions, no satisfying explanation. I know that what I do is wrong and harmful and I am not okay with it. In my depression I make mistakes I can see coming from miles away, make mistakes that I contemplate as I twist in bed, regretting my circumstance. Light passes through darkened windows as a symbol of the brightness I keep myself from. Branches swirl in the wind beneath me. I look at them for a while. Raising the smoke to my lips, I inhale.