It was only yesterday She just kept looking on with that undisguised horror until there was nothing that anyone could do but ask what it was that frightened her so badly.
"It was yesterday," she kept repeating that as though it were a fact, but couldn't seem to go any further. Her arms wrapped around her legs looked so thin and frail as she watched those around her with hollowed eyes. "It was just yesterday."
"What was yesterday," Aryah had been trying, in vain, to get her to calm down. Alijah's emotional state was mellowed for the most part, turning into just the frightened rocking of a childish person who had seen the boogey man come crawling up out from under the bed to go 'boo' right in their face after they had been told in no uncertain terms that said boogey man does not exist. When the certainty crumbled away, there was nothing to keep one from going rather mad.
So the woman sitting quietly repeating the words, "it was only yesterday", had gone rather mad.
"I tried to kill myself yesterday, Aryah," it was the first change in the bizarre monotony of her speaking. "I went out in a boat with a bottle, some dust, and poison. I tried to kill myself, Aryah, that was yesterday. And today you tell me that it's been 300 years. Where did my life go?"
That was the question, where had 300 years gone? What had she done with all that time when she should have been dead? Except that she wasn't dead, she was sitting in the living room with her niece, the daughter of a sister who was long since gone.
In the end, Alijah Kulzari had gone missing. Now she was found, but the world had moved on from that moment. It had turned into something else. A world that she didn't recognize full of people that she sort of knew, but didn't quite.
It was all too much, which was probably why she had taken to drinking heavily since her return. Granted, put up against her previous behavior, it wasn't much of a stretch. She had been deep into liquor, dust, boys. It was just a way to hide the hurt. So now, she was back to hiding the hurt.