InsaneJournal

If it hadn’t been for the opportunity to work with Carla Polk, a bright star Ariande had quoted several times in her thesis before even working with her, Ariadne wasn’t sure when she would have made her way back to New York. Her years at the University of Maryland had been good to her, more or less. She’d become deeply involved in several on campus dramas, the real life sort, young adults figuring out who they are with all the pain and joy that entailed; she’d skipped lectures to hold sobbing friends in their beds after breakups, cried a lot herself when one of her closest friends died, bonded hard over an intense prank war and laughed so hard she’d actually thrown up when one of her best friends practised his standup comedy routine in his dorm. The intensity of that life made it very, very easy to immerse herself in being Harriet Cartwright – Harry, to almost everyone she knew.

She’d lived on campus through her undergraduate degree, shared a truly terrible flat with five others during honours, and almost entirely lived in her office through the first year of her masters. She’d done the first five hundred out of fifteen hundred hours of clinical practice in Maryland, and then a spot had opened up at Carla Polk’s practice in Brooklyn and it was too good an opportunity to pass up.

After arriving in New York several weeks ago, she'd had long enough to set up a routine... which was almost precisely long enough to truly start missing her people back home.

(In the far, distant part of her mind, she knew she had people here too. Her husband was somewhere in this city. And she did love him, truly, but... there were wide oceans of space inside her heart, a whole archipelago of different islands each containing different versions of her life. She could love her husband, truly, but not be ready to sail back toward his island yet.)

She was sharing an apartment with a cousin of one of her classmates back home, and the cousin’s boyfriend, and the boyfriend’s old high school mate who didn’t seem to do much except get high. They got on as well as any four people could get on, living in a place so small everyone was on top of each other, all the time. She didn’t resent them, for being young. She couldn’t resent anyone, for being young. Mostly, she enjoyed being part of their lives very much, and they seemed to enjoy having her around as well.

She had soundproofed her room with egg cartons, though, so she had a quiet place to write her up notes every day.

Today, though, was the first day of her weekend. She had spent a couple of hours getting her notes from the week in order over coffee (before any of the housemates were awake) and then put the study aside. It was easy to get caught up in it, to spend all her free time reading papers that could be very pertinent or could just be interesting – last night she’d fallen down a rabbit hole reading about the development of language disorders which was fascinating but not the topic of her masters at all. If she wasn't firm with herself about taking some time away from reading, she could stay inside all day.

So now she was taking a walk, and her feet had taken her down as close to the water as she could get. Something always drew her toward the sea, or the closest thing to the sea she could find, when she was feeling lonely, some callback to the old days when she’d stand on her island, watching the horizon, waiting for her future to arrive.

She walked along the docks, sending a few pictures to her friends back home, and tried not to miss the days when they all weren’t so busy they’d reply instantly. It wasn’t that Ariande wasn’t used to being on her own, but it really wasn’t her favourite way to be.

Still, there was a very cute little coffee shop advertising its ice coffees where she could sit and watch the massive boats sitting in their dry docks, waiting for the ocean themselves. She ordered and sat down at a table outside, glad for the slight breeze against her warm skin.