Re: log: joey & ella, gatsby
She'd never had to make out a list. When bad things came along, she closed her eyes because if you couldn't see them, they couldn't rub dirty fingers along everything else and make everything the same. She hadn't drawn columns about dialing a number written on a grubby napkin given to her by a dancer at the club, she'd tried not thinking about it and she'd baked a half dozen different kinds of cookies after, like you could take the taste away of poor choices with sugar and cinnamon.
She breathed out at the smile that bloomed full like maybe it had been planning to flower all along. Hopelessness was a dirty word, a dark room in a house with locked doors and the TV playing over and over. Her fingers interwove with his, clean-cut nails and short pale fingers squeezing against the back of broad palm.
"I'm just telling you what you can do your own self," she said like they weren't sat cheek-by-jowl on the step of the closest thing she had to a dream, tinsel-bright. "Don't let what came before tell you what you can do."