Chapter Text
Ceilings, plaster. Can’t you just make it move faster. Lovely, to just sit here with you…
A journey from the moment they met, to the moment they realised they didn’t know each other anymore. Endless nights spent staring at ceilings, into countless days of throwing looks across the room, but never catching them. From stakes being high, to a stake driving them apart. Through hardship and friendship, to situationship to a ship long sailed.
You’re kind of cute but it’s raining harder, my shoes are now full of water. Lovely, to be rained on with you…
The plane trembles and shudders while rainy pitter patter hits its windows. Curtain pulled half-down, as if to shield them from the real world, and lock them in their own. It’s got something. Intimacy that cannot be replicated by a normal life spent in domesticity, no. This is the kind of vulnerable, naked and raw togetherness that only comes from shared horrors. From nightmares and aftermaths spent in too-small beds in too-foreign hotels, but in oh-so-familiar embraces. They never thought runway lights could look so ethereal when the plane touched down outside of Paris, rain pouring down all around everything them.
But it’s so short, and then you’re driving me home, and I don’t want to leave, but I have to go. You kiss me, in the car, and it feels like the start of a movie I’ve seen before…
The Eiffel Tower is supposed to be romantic, and it feels any- and everything but that when they sit across each other at a bistro table. Manilla folder passed, coffee forgotten. Getting lost in seas of blue and deserts of brown, so far apart and different, yet so close. And just like that, like a breeze carrying grains of sand across the dunes, it’s gone. Over, done, past.
I can see you staring, honey, like he’s just your understudy; like you’d get your knuckles bloody for me. Second, third, and hundredth chances, balancing on breaking branches. Those eyes add insult to injury.
She glides across makeshift plank floors in her mother’s white dress. Turning and twirling in the arms of a man who, by all means, should have died. Not on her watch, though. She’d rather die alongside the man, than to have to see tears and another casket being lowered in the ground, buried, together with a beautiful smile.
No.
So she carelessly fell to her knees in front of him, clock ticking away, counting down seconds to detonation.
‘Just give me a minute’. Breathless.
‘Well’, nervous, desperate attempt at humor, ‘that’s about the time you’ve got left.’
It worked out in the end. And now they’re here, white on the wedding dance floor and floral prints, so far out of her normal range of clothes, circling the metaphorical drain. Because everything she ever wanted; stability, family, love… it was all on those wooden planks. In the sink, going down the drain and slipping way past her fingers, no matter how far she reached, no matter how much she tried to evade a certain blue gaze, soft as clouds and hugs that would definitely unravel her.
It was her own fault, really.
‘You should go for him’, she’d said.
I think I’ve seen this film before, and I didn’t like the ending. You’re not my homeland anymore, so what am I defending now? You were my town, and now I’m in exile, seeing you out. I think I’ve seen this film before, so I’m leaving out the side-door.
Seven months.
That’s how long her exile lasted, in theory. Seven months she spent in Paris, staring at a digital scrabble board on a screen small enough to make her squint at it.
Then she came back.
Left her exile, left Paris behind.
Except, it followed her home, if she could ever call this place home again. Her physical exile might have ended when she stepped through that door, but it was never the same. It’d changed everything, and every interaction, every look and hands not held. Every hug not given and smile not returned with honesty. She might’ve died, because this? Felt a lot like haunting her own life, trying to grasp at the tendrils of what once was.
But it’s over, then you’re driving me home, and it kind of comes out as I get up to go. You kiss me, in the car, and it feels like the end of a movie I’ve seen before…
It was a decade later, and it took a hangover and several edibles shared between them, cheese dust still staining her hands (because chopsticks were never her forte to begin with). But she was so scared, so afraid, of losing her.
So she poured her longing for her rock to stay, to not be pushed around and away by a tidal wave, she poured all of that into a ‘high-off-my-ass’ monologue.
‘But you know what it gives?’ Hopeful.
‘It gives me you.’
Devastation. Devastation wrapped in hopefulness. She was lost, so lost, and-
But it’s not real, and you don’t exist, and I cannot recall the last time I was kissed. And it hits me, in the car, and it feels like the start of a movie I’ve seen before.
Realisation. She couldn’t have this, her. And they were halfway to Quantico in their Rideshare when she pulled her hands to herself and hid them in her sleeves.
If she’d noticed, she said nothing.
So, step right out. There is no amount of crying I could do for you. All this time, we always walked a very thin line, you didn’t even hear me out (didn’t hear me out), you never gave a warning sign (I gave so many signs.)
So many signs.
So.
Many.
Signs
You never even see the signs.