ᛏᛟᚾᛁ ᛋᛏᚨᚱᚲ (iron) wrote in thedoorway, @ 2015-02-14 09:31:00 |
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Just because she’d treated brunch like a panacea since that first rough champagne-shadowed Sunday at Sylvester’s didn’t make it one. You could choke down a poached egg and a mimosa and swear up and down that god, I feel so much better - you could drain a pot of coffee and eat an entire prosciutto-wrapped melon and look people right in the eye and lie, no, I don’t have a hangover either, we are seriously animals - but it didn’t fix anything. It made you a little more nauseous, a little more wired. But it got you up. It got you dressed. It got you presentable and it got you pretending, and, for most things, that was as good as the real deal. The number of situations in which faking it wasn’t enough was really very small. This was one of them, though. Sitting here, picking at a (really very well-composed) little salad, floating another ounce of vodka on her half-empty bloody mary and powering through wasn’t going to cut it. Even if it didn’t feel like a cure-all, of course, it could at least have felt like a break - and in some ways, it did. Saturday morning. Cozy, cloudy. Good food. Company with whom silences could be (even if this particular one wasn’t) comfortable. And in other ways, it didn’t. It was the opposite of relaxing, feeling absolutely crazy imposing expectations on a Valentine’s Day. It was ridiculous. It was bullshit. It was classic, hackneyed, television girlfriend, setting some bar for February fourteenth, harboring a mental jumble of questions and conditions and destinations. Wanting an obligatory gesture to mean something was the stupid trap they’d all been set by the holiday everyone loved to hate. But she did want it to mean something - or, at least, wanted to know what it meant. Limbo wasn’t her thing. Uncertainty wasn’t exciting. Being up in the air without a landing plan just wasn’t sustainable for very long, and it was all the more frustrating because there had been a plan; she could look across the table at Tony and see something that had been mapped out and settled and sure - as much as they could be - and yet had somehow gotten lost. Things were backsliding, or maybe moving forward, or maybe going sideways - but whatever direction it was, it was away. And she wanted him closer. She wanted him better. She didn’t need him to stay in one place, but she wanted an itinerary. She didn’t see one here, among the spread laid out in front of her. She did see something - she saw some of herself mirrored back, actually, her desire for … something. (Progress? Confirmation? The inability to pin names to feelings wasn’t helping.) How two people who seemed to want the same thing could so utterly fail to meet in the middle was incomprehensible to her, which was infuriating. Her attempts to shake out of it all felt too dull, deadened. Jabbing her knife a little viciously into a pot of marmalade, she just felt .... tired. “Does this usually have seeds?” She meant it to be teasing - warm, if not exactly gentle - but it lost some heat in the execution. “Or is that just your personal twist?” A bit of it dripped off her toast onto the table, and all she could really think was: appropriate. |