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When you were this high up, physically speaking, it often felt like the clouds were thinner, like there was something off with the rain. Atmospheric winds driven by the dark streets of the city below, absorbing sunlight until they get red hot in the summertime, generating huge convection currents, spin each raindrop into a little dizzying spiral, smacking it against the sides of a window or a railing or a face. It's not quite as heavy, even during a downpour, because the new motion messes with the vectors until they droplets are almost floating, suspended in glass, lightly splattering like a dead body.
There were no lights on in the balcony, or in the penthouse behind it, although a small lamp in the kitchen provided a meagre glow that struggled to reach through the glass door outside. It was raining, a light drizzle, quietly drifting like a feather against the back of Snowman's hand. As minutes passed, each droplet clumped up with its brothers and sisters, forming larger collectives, legions of rain, until gravity grew to be too powerful of an overwhelming force and dragged them down across the surface of Snowman's hand, letting them drop down onto the floor, or the railing. There were seats outside, and an outlet covered by one of those flip-open weather shields, but Snowman didn't have much use for either of them.
The best part about being up here was that the rain was too light to extinguish her cigarettes. Narrow, long menthols at the end of a cigarette holder, pulling in their cold, minty, noxious fumes down between Snowman's teeth, into her throat. She could swear she could feel the tar, every little shard of broken glass, every tiny adulterant put in there to make her life worse, more miserable. The burning pain of additives designed to increase the absorption of nicotine into her body, and she took it in stride. With someone like her, there was always the question of why couldn't she get her own, boutique cigarettes without so much of the awful gunk infesting her lungs, or maybe just roll something by hand?
Well, if you asked her that to her face she'd just put it out in your eye. But if you had to know, it's just an old habit she picked up from someone that used to matter to her a lot more than they do nowadays.
The worst part about being up here, however, was that sometimes the winds got strong enough to blow her cigarette out of its holder. Even if the rain couldn't take it out, it could still get drawn out of view, dropped onto some poor sap below to get trampled underfoot or ran over, spreading her little contribution to pollution into the grime below. She hissed quietly to herself in inhalation, letting the cigarette holder fall away to her side before squeezing smoke out through a narrow gap between her lips, free of makeup for an evening like this. She sheltered in the darkness. The rest of the city had more than enough light, illuminating her just enough.
Her unused forearm rested against the high railing while she leaned, her body pressed into the railing's edge, other hand alternating between dangling by her side and pulling the cigarette holder to her lips. She inhaled, no longer wincing at the pain like she did when she was an amateur smoker decades ago, but accepting it as the payment for services rendered, and then blew it away into the sky, where the smoke would be consumed by twisting raindrops and deposited somewhere on the ground below, or maybe on the windows of her high-rise. She inhaled again, feeling the smoke paint against her scorched tongue, and then blew it back out like a dragon trying to breathe fire and failing.
She got up, straightened her back until it popped, turned around silently. She leaned against the railing the wrong way around, now, no part of her afraid of teetering over the edge, her elbows keeping her hooked in. She inhaled smoke, and exhaled smog into the city's neat, grey clouds, watching it drift away until it would doubtlessly become part of them, too. An errant raindrop, faster than the rest, landed on the end of her cigarette, extinguishing it with a quiet hiss. She pulled it out of her cigarette holder, tapped out the dirty, soggy ash into a nearby ashtray, and flicked it over her shoulder so that it could drift down into the other world beneath her.
Then, sighing quietly, she pulled away from the balcony rail and grabbed the handle of the sliding glass door, tugging it aside after a moment of frustrating stall. She walked back inside and flicked the lights on, shutting the door behind her, and, consequently, shutting away the rain.