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Rory couldn’t find underwear.
She had just broken up with the previously deemed love of her life seven weeks ago and she couldn’t find underwear. The latter, currently, to her, seemed to be the bigger problem.
It was underwhelming, really, how at first she had expected to feel everything and then felt… nothing.
Nada. Not a tiny hint of affection in bits and pieces for the relationship that had gone up in flames.
Her mom, noticeably alarmed by her lack of a reaction, started bringing her cupcakes from the dessert shop she and Suki had newly started.
Her hope might have been that, just like last time, (a similar time when Rory was in high school) it would resolve.
And then weeks passed by…
And it didn’t.
The delicate prodding became endless, and then, as Rory’s empty expression grew stonier, it ceased.
Lorelai knew better than to continue when the daughter she had lovingly sent off to Yale to find her calling had returned, but only as a shell of her former self.
And at what point was it that her hands began trembling?
Rory couldn’t quite recall. Perhaps because she thought she was adjusting to it well. High school relationships don’t last well into college. And Jess of course had just been a prime example of that. Throughout her many unpaid internships around the globe they had simply… drifted apart, and that was that.
Perhaps Rory couldn’t bear to tell herself that it was Jess who had let them drift apart, just like that.
Jess, who had promised he’d always say goodbye.
Before he left.
But a goodbye is hard to come by when it comes to that guy, isn’t it?
And when was it that her hands had begun to tremble so much that the cups had started to drop from her hands?
Rory took out her phone again and again as if the three dots would appear at any time on the tiny screen.
And when they didn’t she’d only stop looking when her breath grew too heavy for it, which happened an awful lot, these days.
And when was it that her mind had started to ramble on and on, endlessly, like the loop of an infinite rollercoaster that she was just begging to get out of?
Ghosting? Hadn’t they already done that once before college?
She had hoped that Jess would grow out of that phase.
Rory was an “avid hoper”, as Jess had once said.
Sometimes, Rory wishes those were the last words he said to her.
And when was it that he had felt the need to humble her, until she was shattered bones and breaking dust? Did he show her any mercy?
Or was it just a “this isn’t you” when she’d taken a gap year to a “I’m disappointed at what you’ve become” to a “I just don’t think we have anything in common anymore” only a week before her final exams for graduation.
But isn’t ’common’ something that people just made up? Surely, with all the books she and Jess had inherited on their shoulders from the likes of people much greater than them- surely, they could find something in there.
But he hadn’t. And he didn’t. And he didn’t want to.
And sometimes, Rory pretends that it doesn’t just kill her.
Kill her.
(She’s still alive.)
So it was enough when she started getting out of bed and doing her laundry, the previous star student, now just a tawdry version of her former self.
But her mom still smiled and looked at her like everything was going to be okay.
(The cups are still broken.)