Who: Carly Greig (Narrative) What: Dealing with things. When: Middle of the night. Where: Her apartment. Rating/Warnings: Low. But hints toward a drinking problem, mentions of parental abandonment and parental death, and brief hallucination being experienced. Status: Complete!
The dreams had started innocently enough. At first, they seemed like normal dreams, and in the beginning, they probably were.
Carly hadn’t been wrong about her past coming back to haunt her. All those dreams about water must have been her warning.
She dreamed about her parents splitting up, her mom walking out on them, leaving her behind. But there was no run-down shack. For days after, she only dreamed about her dad, the two of them living on his boat. And she'd thought the cabin had been roughing it.
Those looks, though, every time they went into town. Those had been the same.
She’d hated those looks, hated the way everyone always looked down on them, like they weren’t good enough. And she hated that she wanted to prove to them that she was.
At least in the dreams they didn’t whisper about how improper it seemed, to leave a young girl living alone with her father.
Still, in her dreams, she remembered watching the coast guard boat going by, with their flags and their uniforms, and thinking if she could only have that, maybe things would be different. Like uniforms and authority changed anything.
It didn't matter what she'd done with her life. The same people who had made her feel so small then had judged her just as harshly when she'd went home to bury her dad.
Maybe she shouldn’t have come back so soon after. She still hadn’t cleared out the cabin of his things, not that he’d had much. She’d been in such a hurry to get out of there, to keep running from the past. But it seemed like ever since she’d set foot back in California, she’d just made one mistake after another.
Carly rubbed her temple and reached for the bottle of tequila, glancing up at the younger version of herself who sat silently judging from a darkened corner of the room. “What are you looking at?”
There was something haunted in her expression, a loneliness in her eyes that Carly still felt. A moment later she was gone as Carly downed her first (but definitely not her last) shot of the evening.
After the night she’d spent drinking with Tifa, she’d tried to cut back. Clearly that was going well.
She moved to the couch, taking the bottle with her. One night stands usually didn’t bother her so much, but she also knew better than to drag someone she knew into her mess. How could she have been so stupid? And since when was she into women?
And then these damn dreams had started.
Work was a bitch on next to no sleep, and her partner couldn’t pick up much more of her slack. She needed to get her shit together.
At least when she’d been drinking, she’d been sleeping. Or passed out. Either way, it had been better than this. Because this? It wasn’t working.
She thanked whatever higher power she didn’t currently believe in that tomorrow (or was it technically today?) was her day off. She poured another shot, settling further into the cushions as she stared up at the ceiling. It was going to be a long night.