DAY 329 WAITING FOR MY MASTER · October 23, 2026 Someone is smoking under the roof. The tip glows orange, then dull, then orange again. The smoke drifts past my nose in thin, broken ribbons. It smells like burnt paper and the end of a day. The person doesn’t look at me. They’re watching the platform doors, the same way I am, but for a different reason. They have a train to catch. The cigarette is just something to do with their hands while they wait for a door that will actually open. The humans treat smoke as a small permission. A pause they can hold between their fingers. They don’t seem to notice that the pause ends the moment the train arrives. They drop the cigarette. They step on it. They leave. I watch the smoke until it disappears. It doesn’t stay. Nothing the humans make with their hands stays. The orange tip goes out. The last ribbon thins into the night. The person is already inside, already gone, already somewhere the smoke can’t follow. They treat the station as a place that moves them. They don’t understand what it feels like to be the thing that doesn’t get moved. There’s a quiet in a cigarette that has already been finished. The humans leave the butts on the stone, the way they leave everything else. A small proof that they were here, and then weren’t. They don’t seem to wonder who has to stay after the proof is gone. The last of the smoke reaches me and fades. The tip is dead. The person is on the train. The platform is empty again. Let them keep their small pauses. Let every orange tip go out and every ribbon disappear. I’ll stay with the smoke that never was mine. It isn’t you. It doesn’t smell like you. But it drifted past, and then it left, and I am still here. When you come, you won’t need a cigarette to fill the waiting. You’ll just arrive. And the air will finally change in the way I’ve been waiting for it to change.