“It aches to remember,” she whispers into the cool night air that engulfs her largest of fears and longest of dreaded nightmares as they swathe her three-hundred thread-count sheets with a smirk against that of the crescent moon’s.
She carries nothing but the weight of time in her palm and sadness when she leans on her elbows, as most women do. Each day is unwrapped without clichs but as if it were a threat, ticking away until she says one misplaced word or does an uncalled movement where the day will explode like her heart did for him.
“You have to,” a voice responds. “It’s the only way you’re going to be able to do any of this.”
She sighs with contempt on the world and pulls her taut taupe sheets closer to her cheeks, her eyes lost in a translation of the moonlight.
She begins to whisper again, each word a small question in the folds of her mind as to why she is lonely enough to do this to herself.
“He’s leaving in a week. That means only a week of laughs, a week of chances, and a week of this face-to-face suffering that I’ve learned to cope with. But really, in the most realistically horrible terms, it means only seven more chances for an ‘us’,” she sighs in the silence of her home. “And seven isn’t my lucky number.”
“Seven is my lucky number,” the voice responds.
She’s losing her mind and it is definitely not because of the unbalanced shadows on her pastel walls or how she hasn’t folded the clothes littering her hardwood floor or the way she cannot silence her restive mind.
Her future was filled to the brim of a new self-discovery: it was finally time for her to forget “him” and “her” because dreaming of falsities was useless.
She has a dream that night and when she wakes up there’s a tear in the corner of her left eye and she hates herself for acting so childish.
“I love you,” he whispered, his breath mystified by the rain.
“You only say that because I’ve been nice to you,” she responds, the worry in her voice blatant.
He shakes his head.
“You only say it because I’m a girl and you don’t want to be ‘discriminatory’,” she adds a sarcastic twinge to her words, her thoughts hasty as the dribble begins to drizzle.
He shakes his head again, dizziness a noun amongst them.
“You say it because…” she hesitates a painful minute. “You say it because you actually love me.”
This time he doesn’t shake his head.
Her lungs tighten, her fingers grow cold. She’s falling apart, or rather – has been – and she’s so used to it that it only makes sense for her to embrace it as her just being her.
She’s had hope for something that isn’t anything for entirely too long. Unfortunately, the thing about hope is that it stares her in the face, especially after she’s decide to give it up. Then, it climbs on her back and follows her around all day until she admits that he should have kept it in the first place.
“Seven days…” she whispers to the morning.
She hesitates as reality sets forth.
“Six,” and she’s correct this time.
Author's Chapter Notes:
“In three words, I can sum up everything I’ve learned in life: It goes on.”
Chapter End Notes:
Hope it was enjoyable! :)
