Work Text:
when she’s a little scared or overwhelmed, mel finds it helpful to squeeze her hands together tight, and just mentally start listing out all the things she can see around her. it’s a very simple self-soothing exercise, which mel feels sounds more digestible to say than ‘coping technique’, and it’s been widely practised in the anxious community for probably decades. and since it’s 6:20 a.m., and she’s all-aboard that ‘faithful friend’ of hers (known to the rest of pittsburgh as just bus 12), mel can – thankfully – see quite a lot. a pink morning sky with swirling orange clouds stuck in it. an elf bar poking out of the pocket of someone too young to legally possess it. a five-year-old with a (hopefully) purely decorative band-aid stretched across her nose. two businessy dilfs carrying their businessy briefcases. a beautiful crystalline layer of freeze covering the allegheny river that provides enough stability for the pigeons to strut boldly over the ice jams. and, of course, her own reflection in the window.
all good stuff. great stuff, even. it’s only that ‘five things i can see’ isn’t really cutting it today. her heart is still racing uncooperatively in her chest. maybe grounding exercises only work when you aren’t causing the problems for yourself by yourself, she thinks, chiding.
mel’s probably in love. that’s what it really is; those are the dry facts of it. in her objective self-appraisals, which are conducted as a part of her bedtime routine (after she pops in her retainer and sets her alarm, she slips between her sheets and begins impartially asking herself what she did well that day and what there was room to improve on tomorrow, usually around social interactions), she’s suspected it of herself for a long time. she’s been displaying symptoms for ten months, minimum. and it’s reaching crisis, teetering on unavoidable now. code blue.
you see, it was dreadfully rainy a couple days ago. thunder and lightning and everything. then at work yesterday, on their shared lunch break, mel told frank (because she had so little else new to offer, her life was so dull compared to his) how the night before she’d had a silly dream that she’d lost this yellow umbrella. it was just a dream, but in this just-a-dream, she was overwrought, grievously stressed over the fate of this dumb old umbrella, and searching fruitlessly for it. no dream stones left unturned. she’d woken up that morning, carrying every bit of that stress, just as though she really had spent all night looking for it.
then, this fine morning at 6:11, when mel was just stepping foot onto bus 12, and frank was probably locking in on mile four of five of his morning run, he texted her:
oh, it wouldn’t do. it wouldn’t, it wouldn’t.
so mel recalibrates; stuffing her phone back into her pocket, and pressing her chilly hands over her hot cheeks. frank will grumble about being left on read later, but she can’t think about that right now. there’s only fifteen minutes left until the bus pulls up to ptmc, and she needs to get a grip before then. and so she begins composing another mental list, of a very different sort.
this time it’s not ‘five things i can see’, but instead ‘five things i will never do again’. starting with: kiss a married man, no matter how nice his chin.