Ari ♫ ♪ ♬ (gracenotes) wrote in emillion, @ 2014-04-20 19:30:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, !narrative, arielle chiaro |
'Cause my heart's in two places, and I'm feeling like a candle burning at both ends 'til it flickers
Who: Ari
What: Coping (not really)
Where: What’s left of her flat in the Theatre District
When: Friday through Sunday
Rating: PG-ish
Status: Complete
She makes it home somehow. Honestly, she has no idea how. The staircase along the side of the Tipsy Sheep sags drunkenly, steps missing, railing gone. There is glass in the street, and a line of people out the door. She ignores them, climbs the broken stairs. After a few minutes of mindless poking at the lock with the few picks she’s managed to salvage, it gives. The windows are broken, things that were once on she shelves littering the floor. She looks, blankly, at her guitar, crushed under a shelf that toppled on it. Then she looks at her cello, in its stand in the corner -- amazingly, still whole -- and feels that press against her chest, the one that says she’s about to cry, She trudges through the mess on the floor, not caring what she steps on. Her bed is still unmade, blankets sliding off its edge to the floor, but there is no glass in it, and that is all she cares about. The pillow, when she rests her head upon it, smells like oranges (Aspel’s shampoo). She clutches it against her chest, pressing her face into it, and lets the tears come. She stays there until she is too tired to cry, then sleeps. She wakes in the dark. The lights, as it turns out, don’t work; she trips over things as she makes her way to the kitchen, opens the refrigerator. She finds a bottle of wine, three-quarters full, and half a carton of ice cream, and little else. It is good enough. She retreats back into her sanctuary, drawing the comforter around her like a cocoon, and drinks wine from the bottle, polishes off the ice cream. Nicely buzzed, she tries not to think. (But it is difficult, because she is somehow broken inside, but she has never been stupid; she knows exactly what has happened to her.) And so she picks through her emotions one by one, the way she will eventually have to pick through her possessions, only these cannot be discarded so easily. Pain. In her body, in her mind, in her heart. Fear. For herself. Worse, for others. Grief. The sort she’s never experienced, the sort that makes even the tears she’d shed at Ancelot’s funeral seem pale and distant. Love. The sort she sings about but never seeks, the sort that comes with grandiose promises, with terrifying dependence, with I can’t live without you. The sort for which she’ll walk willingly into danger, will sing until her voice breaks, will weep until her tears run out. How did she get here? (Through judicious application of feigned ignorance and denial.) She goes for a second bottle. Her communicator screen is broken, but it works. She switches it on finally and scrolls through the messages, pushing unkempt hair from her eyes. The city goes on, it seems. The city always goes on. She can’t. She ignores frantic messages, answering only a select few with monosyllables so they won’t think she’s dead under a pile of rubble somewhere. Hopefully, they’ll leave her alone. Friends checking up on her. A note from Edwin (Fellina’s missing; she probably shouldn’t cry about that, but at this point, even the absence of a woman she deeply dislikes has her tearing up). Her director, telling her the show’s opening is postponed (how he can worry about such things right now she can’t imagine, but she responds to him, tells him, fine and promptly forget about it). She’s out of ice cream but her stash of wine, saved up over months of work-related sobriety (no longer important), is considerable. She pops another cork, takes the bottle back to bed. Drinking away her feelings seems like a fabulous idea. (She wants, quite desperately, for someone to hold her when the tears come again, as she knows they will, but she looks at her communicator, then away. She’s not certain being around another hume is something she can handle. At least the wine doesn’t ask questions.) |