everthere

Heard a woman cough and felt myself dying. This was this morning. I always get my paper in the little store across from the building where I work. The woman that went in just before me, bought a pack of cigarettes. I don't remember the brand, I was hardly in the moment, caught in a bubble of I don't know what. When I walked outside, my bubble burst. The woman coughed.
It was a bad cough. The kind where you hear phlegm and all sorts of other icky stuff move about in a person's chest. I heard her all the way to my office. I felt it, too. Had visions of soot and pulmonary tissue crumbling, dissolving into mucus and I saw myself coughing up brown chunks of phlegm mixed with blood, lying in a hospital bed in a ward among bedridden, grey, wrinkled, unshaven men with dull eyes and hollow cheeks.
Monday morning, this is your wake up call. I don't think I'll light a cigarette today.
Will see what tomorrow brings.