When Cindy Simpson lost everything - her family, her home, her health, her dignity - she found her words.

She found a way to write out her pain, her fear of falling back into her addiction. She found a way back.

That's when photographer Stacia Spragg-Braude found her.

It was October 2004. Simpson was 47, twice-divorced, a grandmother and a woman struggling to untangle herself from a cocaine addiction.

She found Bridges for Women, a residential program for women returning from the edge. Bridges used writing as therapy and reflection, and Simpson grabbed onto her journal like a buoy.

Spragg-Braude, then a staff photographer with The Tribune, was assigned the story. She was there when Simpson graduated from the program. She was there when Simpson reconciled with her children and three grandchildren, whom she told Spragg-Braude she had betrayed by her drug use.

Simpson moved on to a transitional living facility called Villa de Paz and then on to a studio in the Southeast Heights. Spragg-Braude moved on to another assignment.

But for Spragg-Braude, the story of Cindy Simpson, of redemption and failure and breaking the cycle, wasn't over yet.

Simpson was still writing it.

"There was something about her that was strong, like she could make it," Spragg-Braude said. "She was different from the others."

The two women embarked on the story together. The result is this multimedia presentation: Breaking the cycle.

It's a work of trust. But it hasn't always been a happy story to tell.

Shortly after Simpson left Bridges, she found a job at the Waffle House, bought a car and enrolled at TVI, where she took classes to become a paralegal.

She bought a TV set, the first one she had ever purchased. Televisions, in her old world, were traded for crack cocaine.

But she couldn't keep from trading her new life in for more cocaine. Once more, she lost everything. The school, the job, the car, the reconciliation, the salvation, gone.

The smell of salvation slams into my brain

through my nostrils and I breathe

deep, knowing I will feel

better soon.

Simpson wrote the words in a poem she called "My Life Before" to describe her descent into the emptiness of drugs.

My cookie is ready, and, razor

blade in hand, I shave off my crumb

and lovingly place it at

the end of my pipe, grab my lighter

and say a silent prayer

that the train will come speeding

down the tracks of

my brain and obliterate everything

that is wrong with my life.

Years ago when Simpson was a college freshman taking nursing classes in Alamogordo, an English teacher told her she was wasting her time.

"You're a born writer," the teacher told her. "Do that."

She didn't listen then.

Spragg-Braude, meanwhile, lost contact with Simpson, who had returned to the streets. By the time the women saw each other again in August 2005, Simpson had found her way to a short-term drug rehab program, gotten clean, moved in with a friend and re-enrolled in TVI.

She was back again.

But this time, it is without programs such as Bridges, closed when the grant money withered. A call to the Bridges office brought a disconnect notice.

Sobbing, I hit my knees and pray to God for strength, for knowledge, for salvation, for anything that will keep me sane and safe from the demons that torment my dreams.

Simpson wrote those words in an essay called "Recovery."

So far, she has maintained, subsisting mostly on a student loan. She doesn't have the money for a car, so she walks or rides the bus, her knees tattered by hard life, so sore she sometimes feels they will buckle like her plans.

Spragg-Braude sometimes finds herself giving Simpson a ride, gently reminding her of the line between journalist and companion, between watching the story and being the story.

Sometimes those lines blur with humanity. Sometimes those lines don't matter at all.

. . . but I just don't know if I'll ever find the strength for another recovery. God help me - I just don't know.

So heart racing, hands trembling, I rise up and hold my head high and swear an oath that, just for today, I will do the next right thing.

It's all either woman can ask for.