r (reposeremembers) wrote in repose, @ 2020-04-19 19:26:00 |
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Entry tags: | hannah smith, seven morgan, ~plot: memories |
Memory
What: Memory
Will characters be viewing the memory or experiencing it?: Experiencing
Warning, this memory contains: Disillusionment
You never get enough sleep. Fact. You know how everyone goes through that teenage period where Saturday starts around midday, when your tongue is thick in your mouth and you’ve got some stupendous bedhead going on and you wake because someone is mowing the grass or working on their car, or shrieking outside in the pool? Yeah? You didn’t.
There’s never enough hours left over and the ones you do have, you stretch so tight that they’re kind of fuzzy and to be honest, a lot of the same even if they’re in different places. You could live like a monk and sleep, the prim dedication of an acolyte in some kind of religion but even if you’ve got the faith? You don’t have monk in you. You kind of know you’re going to need to find him but there’s time. You have years and you’re tired and let’s face it, most of the time you ache like a grandma in a retirement community back home but you’ll stop cramming stuff into the off-hours later. You’ll put in more time in the early mornings instead of falling out of the comforter and shuffling into the shower like the undead. You’ll drink water, instead of beer. You’ll stop checking out the new guys’ glutes as they come into class, and you’ll check them out as competition instead. But all of that is tomorrow. You’re pretty confident you’ve got a lot of tomorrows and today is all about right now.
You phone home. Every other Sunday, mostly when you’ve sobered up. You don’t talk about the nights out. You talk about practice. About all the hope you’ve got packed up for tomorrows. You talk filler, which is mostly what this is. Fill-in. Because no one else is calling home on Sundays and you know that. You punch in a little hope, you laugh at weak jokes (if they’re made). You listen to the space between silences. By the time you’re done on Sunday, you’re in that spot. The do-better one. Stretch more. Wake earlier. Prove a little more. Because let’s face it, as a last hope you’re not much of one and as much as you try to hold onto that, it gets a little crushing by the middle of the week. You’ve never been all that good with expectation and it kind of feels like you’re trailing more of it these days. You’re alone in it, so you know, you don’t like being alone in it, and we circle right the way back to not having monk in you. There’s a joke there, but you’re not going to crack it.
So you’re tired. Pretty universally. It’s not new, and the crushing, pulsating onset of a headache isn’t new either. Hangover. That’s what you assume, as much as you can assume anything coming up out of fuzzy unconsciousness that feels deep. It takes a while. Longer. There’s no alarm, your head feels like your temples are in a workshop vice and someone’s cranking the handles. BAD hangover and you kind of feel like you’re semi-awake but the rest of you isn’t. It’s blurry and your throat is drier than the Sahara and you blink, and it feels like someone put pennies on your eyelids to keep them shut and you have to push against them to get your eyes open.
The ceiling is different. It looks kind of like popcorn. Swirls and spits of plaster and you can’t remember ever looking at that ceiling. Maybe it’s someone else’s ceiling. This surfaces, fuzzily and your mouth is dry and it tastes like ass and someone else’s ceiling is definite a possibility. There’s a faint blip. It’s not helping with the vice-squeeze on your temples, the bip -- bip -- bip, it’s like the kind of alarm that’s subconscious annoying enough that you come all the way awake just to shut it off. You do. You blink heavily at the popcorn ceiling and you thrust out an arm to hit the bedside cabinet, or whatever, wherever the bip -- bip -- bip is coming from. Or you try to. The moment you try to thrust anything, there’s a stab of something that ought to be sharp, nose-searingly, eye-wateringly sharp but it feels kind of far-off, kind of muzzy like it’s wrapped in fabric. It’s still stabbing you in the chest, just you know. Nicely. You cut out the attempt to shut off the alarm right away.
Bad hangover. You reassess. As much as you can reassess when you feel like you have vertigo lying down. You blink, and the popcorn ceiling wheels like the tilt-a-whirl on the pier and you feel nausea take the elevator to the back of your throat, and swallow on acid.
“Oh, you’re awake.” A voice. It’s not unusual. You sleep hard, when you sleep. The unusual part is that voice is 100% female and you can hear her moving toward you. Plastic-y footfalls on ...hardwood? This must be one hell of a hangover, and you blink blearily upward, into the face of a woman who’s looking at you with the kind of concern you can see written in neon over her face. She’s wearing pjs. You’re wondering why the hell you’re in bed with a woman who looks old enough to be your stepmom, when she says, “Don’t try to move.” You’d say no problem, boss, because there’s no way you’re moving when you think you’re about to hurl, but she’s turned her back and the blip -- blip -- blip goes down an iota until it’s blissfully quieter.
“Are you in pain?” She reaches over. Her hand is warm, dry. Her fingers curl around your palm and you’re wondering what the hell you woke up to, and why her pjs look weird as she pushes something plastic up against your fingers. “Squeeze here.” You do. It hurts. It one hundred percent hurts and you squeeze until it feels like all your muscles unlock at once and the iron band around your forehead unlatches maybe an inch.
You breathe. It’s surprisingly hard. “Where am I?” It feels like an appropriate question, under the circumstances. It’s surprisingly hard, too. You pass out before she can say when, in her navy pjs.
When you wake, you’re not hungover. You’re vaguely nauseous but it might be hunger. You’re never 100% on when hunger kicks in, it tends to creep up on you, kick you in the nuts when it means business. The woman is quietly adjusting something to your right, and you turn your head and look at her. You’re not muzzy enough to think those are pjs. Those are scrubs, and you’d feel panic staircase all the way down to your gut, but something’s taken the edge off that, and you try to put elbows behind you and lever yourself upward and she turns, quickly, like she expected it.
“Don’t. It’ll hurt,” she says it kindly. Like the physio, just before she does something excruciating to your back, that loosens up after a really long bath and a glass of wine with ibuprofen chaser. You’ve figured it out. Okay, you’re not the sharpest crayon in the box but even you can add two and two together and make it more than two. You start the check-in. You know the one, the one that starts with your feet and works up from there. Panic is metallic at the back of your throat, and she’s talking while you’re flexing the toes on your left foot, curling them up as your heart tries throwing itself against your rib-cage like it’s a stray trying to let loose from the pound. You tune in half-way through, when she starts talking about your emergency contact. Dad. You just have the one, and you’re not even thinking about the emergency before you try to move and the pain that crawls up the back of your nose and spits into your eyes is blinding, and you can’t hear her, there’s ringing in your ears and your throat is closing. You pick up a word, maybe another, as you squeeze that little plastic button and cold sweeps through you, lead relief. You hear that it’s your knee, but you’re under. You’re drowning.
You know her name now. You and she, you’re tight. About as tight as you can get when she’s the only person you see every day for the last six weeks. You’re waiting for her, and it’s kinda sad that you’re waiting for a middle-aged woman like a kid hanging out for a trip from the Easter bunny, but this is what this shit boils down to. You know that thing about monks? You’re living the monk life right now. It’s your birthday, and it completely, one hundred percent, genuinely sucks and this lady is the only one making an appearance.
She sits down in a plastic chair, the chunk of the AC unit cutting under the beeps, and she reaches over and drops something onto the tray over the bed in front of you, zero presentation skills in play. You don’t want to look, but you do. It’s a cupcake. It’s a shitty cupcake, it’s the kind sold in packs of two at service stations or, more likely, the cafeteria downstairs. But you’ve got a lump working its way into the back of your throat, and when she shoves a candle, waxy and mishapen from getting lit a bunch of times, jams it straight down into the middle of the frosting, you kind of laugh, and it’s a hiccough, a little wet.
“You got people coming in tomorrow?” She leans over with a lighter, the kind you bought at bodegas for the cigarettes you were never meant to smoke. The candle’s a little spitty. Your mind doesn’t go to class. It picks up the photograph, the last one tacked to the wall. The room kind of fills up a little, then. With the shapes of people who could have been there. Might have been there. Climbed on the blankets, fiddled with the machines, peered out the window. There’s maybe one left. You have no idea if they’re somewhere like here. You kind of expected you’d see them, in one of those tomorrows. The ones way back at the beginning, when you had a bunch going spare. You know Dad’s burned a chunk of change on being here. There’s only so many heres he can spare. You’ve been here weeks and you figure there’s a lot of people who think about dropping by, tomorrow.
The candle kind of wavers. You look at her, and you shrug. “Tomorrow’s just another today.” And you blow it out.