"Pride and Dignity"

He was prideful.

It was a trait of his, a part of him, that he was never ashamed of but rather even boasted.

He took pride in himself, in what he looked like and what he had, in what he said and who listened, in what he did and what others thought about it.

He thought pride was for the strong, the powerful, the great. To be meek was to be weak.

No one taught him the difference between dignity and arrogance. And he never cared to learn it himself. For learning was for the stupid. He forgot it was also for the ignorant.

And yet here he was inhaling cheap cigarette smoke in this dark dirty alley between brick and cobblestone on a freezing Friday night, listening and learning and beholding.

Pink dry lips wrap around the filter of half a black mint Marlboro, sucking in a long breath that made the other end flicker, and wispy smoke plumes from her mouth.

It is elegant the way long pianist fingers support the portable cancer and how pale arms prickle in the wind. She has never been less than elegant, but never more so than in these late moments of quiet passion when she speaks like she's making love; gentle, careful. Elegant.

She is dignified, he concludes, as starlight quivers on the dewy surface of her eyes and her speech, velvet and syrup, whispers of galaxies and dead stars and newborn stars and worlds beyond our reach.

It is right, somehow, to be in awe of this woman who was humbled by nothing short of the universe itself. And when he steals a drag from her hanging cigarette and puffs the smoke into her gaping mouth, he sneaks in murmurs of how the stars are in her eyes and the galaxies swirl in her mind and that she is his universe.

- Ariadne Grey