Embracing Freedom: My Journey Beyond Obedience and Norms

This story was submitted on September 26th 2026 by Cicada33, author of The road to freedom. If you have a story to submit it’s right here !

This story is a series divided into 15 parts:

Working in Aunt Lisa’s salon had a strange, liberating rhythm. I spent days washing hair, mixing strong dyes and cleaning floors, but not once did I feel as tired as I did in my mother’s basement. The atmosphere was easy and relaxed, the customers cheerful, and Lisa herself never made any drama. Even that heavy cigarette smoke, which bothered me so much at first, became part of my everyday life, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

With each new day, I was consciously getting closer to the woman whom, under my mother’s influence, I hated all my life and considered a family disgrace. Every conversation we had, every cheeky smile from Lisa and the cloud of tobacco smoke she would blow towards the ceiling, was to me an act of pure, raw defiance. I enjoyed our closeness because I knew how furious my mother would be to see me with Lisa.

When she found out that I had left the archive, she called me and screamed over the phone. But this time, instead of shutting up and swallowing the dumpling, I followed Martha’s advice. I waited for her to finish, and then told her briefly and coldly that my work was my sole concern. I hung up. The feeling of freedom was incredibly powerful.

“Ena, come here” I heard Lisa’s sharp voice as soon as I stepped into. She was standing by the counter with a slim cigarette between her fingers, sizing me up with visible displeasure. “Again, that gray sweatshirt of yours and jeans that look like a trash bag. Listen to me carefully, this is a beauty salon. Customers come here to buy beauty, and you won’t attract anyone in that boring, baggy wardrobe. Actually, you’re just like your mother. She never had style either, she’s always buttoned up to the throat, a respectable doctor.”

That comparison with my mother annoyed me. The sentence “You are the same as your mother”, echoed in my head like a slap. Anger coursed through my body.

“Okay,” I said, gritting my teeth and looking her straight in the eyes. “Take me. Buy me whatever you think I need”.

Lisa just smiled triumphantly, blowing out a thin stream of smoke.

Immediately after the end of her shift, she locked the salon and took me to a private, secluded boutique in the city center where she bought a wardrobe for herself. As soon as we entered, I noticed that the atmosphere inside was completely relaxed, there was a crystal ashtray on the table, and the worker immediately offered Lisa a lighter. Smoking was allowed in this boutique, just like in Lisa’s salon.

Lisa was a constant smoker. One after another, long thin slim cigarettes disappeared from between her lips as she sorted through the racks of clothes with quick, expert movements. She pulled out a tight dark plush top, dark skinny pants that followed the line of her body, a black short jacket and sandals with gold straps.

“Go to the cabin. Put this on,” she ordered. When I got dressed and went out in front of the big mirror, I felt strange. The clothes perfectly accentuated my curves, waist and legs, body parts that I had successfully hidden under my mother’s loose cuts for years. The bodies I built by training to swim as a child and later through high school.

Lisa came up from behind. Her hands with a bunch of jingling bracelets started hanging a thin chain around my neck. I observed us in the mirror. Lisa was standing just behind me, holding a long cigarette in her left hand, her ember smoldering near my shoulder.

Lisa brought her head closer to mine. Our eyes met in the mirror. “You look incredibly hot, sweetie,” she whispered to me softly, in that deep, husky smoking voice of hers.

In a second, a wave of shame washed over me. I blushed, looking away from my own reflection, but at the same time I felt somehow unusual in that outfit, powerful.

As I watched her through the glass as she brought the filter to her lips and inhaled the smoke with absolute aesthetic, naturalness and attitude, a thought crossed my mind, that combination of her relaxation, sharp clothes and sharp tongue was the definition of freedom, rebellion. As I looked at her in the mirror next to me, in her new clothes, I thought for the first time in my life how cool it was to have an aunt like this.

I entered the apartment in a new wardrobe, with bags in my hands. Marta was sitting at the table in the living room. As soon as she saw me, her eyes widened with delight.

“Man, Ena! Lisa is a genius. It suits you so well, it accentuates your figure unreal. You finally look like a girl your age, not like a nerd from the reading room. You look unreal. Like from the runway, I swear. I have to take your picture. Right away, while the light is good.”

“No way, Marta,” I blushed, looking away. I felt that old, nerdy shame come over me. “Please don’t, it’s stupid. I look funny, this is not for me.”

“Sit there and shut up,” she commanded through a smile, already pulling out her camera.

I gave in, sat down on the chair, facing the window. Marta clicked, changed angles, but I was rigid. My shoulders were raised, my hands were clenched, and my eyes were scared. When she finished the first series, I went over to look at the screen of the camera. I looked tense and scared.

“There, I told you, I knew it wouldn’t turn out nice. I’m not for that, Marta. I just can’t be cool.”

Marta put down the camera, looked at me with that serious, sharp look of hers, and then her eyes fell on the pack of cigarettes that was on the table.

“You want to be cool? Okay, now let’s go get mine. Sit back.”

She took a long, thin white cigarette from the pack and handed it to me.

“Marta, I don’t smoke, I told you a hundred times,” I snapped, putting my hand away.

“Well you don’t light it, genius,” Marta laughed, coming closer to me. “This is a prop. Imagine it’s a pencil. Just pick it up. Put it between your fingers. Trust me.”

Slowly, with a slight tremor that I could not hide, I took her in my hands. Feeling the cigarette between my fingers was a strange, almost sinful sensation. She was light. As my skin touched the smooth paper, that night on the terrace flashed in my head, the moment I screamed with rage. Then I protested and screamed, and now… now I just stood and silently let Marta guide me through this darkness.

“Put your hand down a little, Ena,” Martha’s voice interrupted me. “Hold it loosely between your index and middle finger. Like that. Don’t tighten your wrist.”. She took a picture of me.

“Now put it in your mouth.”

I pulling my hand back. “Marta, I won’t,” I protested, my voice sounding scared, geeky, as if my mother was watching me from around the corner. “I told you I don’t smoke.”

“Come on, Ena, relax,” answered Marta calmly. “Nothing will happen to you, I promise you. It’s just a prop. The cigarette isn’t lit at all.”

I listened to her. I put the filter to my lips, something old Ena would never do. I felt a sharp, dry smell of tobacco that immediately rose up my nostrils, and the paper slightly stuck to my lower lip. And at that moment, while the white tube was between my lips, I had a picture of Lisa in front of my eyes. I remembered how she stood in front of the mirror, with that same cigarette in the corner of her mouth, wild, untouchable and overwhelming.

Suddenly, that cold wave of Lisa’s energy poured into me. I completely forgot that I had a cigarette in my mouth. The fear is gone. Mimicking Lisa’s sassy attitude, I straightened my back, let my jacket slide off my shoulders, and fixed the lens with a look of pure, raw confidence.

Marta let out a soft sigh of delight, and I, with a cigarette between my lips, finally felt like a woman in control.

Late at night, I lay in the darkness of my room. The cell phone screen lit up in front of my face. Marta sent me photos. I watched in silence, and my heart began to beat like crazy. In those pictures, I didn’t see that scared Ena who failed her year at university and is humiliated by her own mother every day. I saw a powerful, beautiful, cool girl looking sassy straight into the camera, with a long cigarette in the corner of her mouth and nice clothes. The white line of the unlit cigarette made a perfect contrast to my geeky vision glasses. I felt incredibly powerful as I looked at myself.

An alarm suddenly went off in my head. I remembered the pulmonology lecture. I remembered slides of destroyed, black lungs, cancer statistics and the tar slowly cementing the alveoli. I knew, from a medical point of view, that it was a horrible, destructive habit that destroyed the body.

But as I looked at the bluish light of the screen and that girl in the picture, medicine seemed so distant and irrelevant. The cigarette itself, that long white line between my fingers, aesthetically seemed so powerful, so free. She gave me a sense of control like Lisa had.

I liked that dangerous version of me. I really liked her. But I must not allow myself to become a smoker, that is not smart.

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Side effects of obedience (part 6)

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