Her eyes flutter, greeted by the sun’s welcoming glow creeping through her translucent bedroom curtains. Her hand subconsciously flops across the bed, seeking a warm companion. It slides up and down, reaching for the man she dreamt of moments before. Slowly she opens her eyes and looks to see his wide eyes gazing at hers, but really sees that he isn’t there and never was. Then she realizes how much she wishes she didn’t have to sleep so she wouldn’t be tempted and teased with implausible dreams of him dreaming of her, too.
In her dreams she’s taller. Her hair is thicker, longer, and vibrant under the passing afternoon’s sun. Her clothes descend from elite stores like Saks Fifth Avenue and Dolce & Gabbana, her neck adorned with gems from the deepest parts of the sea. In her dreams she lives in an open field, surrounded by blossoming daisies and lush hills of grass, completely secluded from the harsh realities of the world.
But to her, none of it matters because in all of her dreams, he is there. He is standing next to her in fields splattered with greens, yellows and pinks. He is holding her small hand as she laughs at the sky and dares the sun to come closer. He is pulling her close while they lay under painted sunsets and glistening stars. He is always there.
When she finally awakes from her precious and inevitable dreams, she feels blissful; as if he was standing with her, as if he was holding her hand, and as if he was pulling her close. But then she realizes she can’t be that lucky and she doesn’t deserve him and regret tumbles over her fragile heart once again; every morning.
He’s only been back in Scranton for a few days but to her it feels like he was never there to begin with. He doesn’t say hello in the morning. He doesn’t email her pranks to pull on Dwight. He doesn’t say stupid things to see the corner of her eyes crinkle and her lips spread miles. He doesn’t spin in his chair as if he was bored only to turn and flash a smile or wink when he doesn’t think she’s looking but is. He’s not Jim.
He’s with some new girl whose name has already been forgotten. She’s perky, straight-haired, and looks as if she was pulled right out of a nine dollar business women’s magazine. It’s not fair, she thinks, that this girl waltzed into Jim’s life and immediately snatched him up for the taking. It’s not fair that this girl can call him her own when Pam’s been waiting for the day when she could walk into her apartment and see him there, waiting for her, too. It’s not fair that this girl can push it in Pam’s face when she used to own all of Jim’s facial expressions; tears, smiles, and his faithful grin.
But then she thinks, yes, it is fair, because for years she had too many chances but was overly situated in her own story to begin a new chapter for Jim to share.
She jabs the black, pasty mascara wand into its lean container, regretting the choice to put it on in the first place. It was a pointless attempt to boost her confidence and appearance when she knew Jim wasn’t going to look at her anyway. Besides, she knew the mascara was probably going to end up smeared across her cheeks; she could already feel the tears coming.
She sighs, looks at the clock and decides she better go; Michael wouldn’t be happy to know she was late for work. “You could miss sooo many calls! Then it will get hard to keep up and you will lose track of how to do things right. Thatswhatshesaid!” he explains to her too many times.
She pulls on her sky blue jacket, reaches for her purse, and is out the door, wanting to do anything but face the reality of her life.
Nothing’s been right, lately. She hasn’t laughed that much and over the years Jim’s proven that her only continuous source of happiness is laughter. She hasn’t painted for weeks, lacking any type of inspiration from her regular sources; the sunset, music, or most importantly, Jim. She hasn’t even been eating right; her usual favorite, yogurt, tastes like despair on her forgetful tongue, and Jim’s famous melted cheese sandwich she mimics at home make her feel lonely.
She hates how she let herself fall so far; always on the verge of tears, phone calls becoming missed ones because all she can say is, “You wouldn’t understand,” and sleeping away her miseries because there’s nothing in reality worth living. But most of all, she hates how she doesn’t know how to begin to pull herself back up.
Her relationship with Jim is like a ferris wheel – they started low with layers of suspense but kept building, building, building until they hit the exact, dead center and fully exposed top, only to fall again, retreating to the ground beneath, falling and falling until all they could see was the unwelcoming ground they started on. Unspoken words hover above them like thundering clouds on the verge of their rupture, causing their landing to be a slippery, confusing mess that neither of them was deserved. Palliative raindrops fall as sorrow; tears endlessly seeping from their tired eyes.
She drives down her street, feeling gloom pass over her weary eyes as she realizes she has to see him today. She sighs, saddened by this understanding, wondering if there was any way to escape seeing the man who made her tearless, the man who made her scream into her satin pillows at night, and the man who gave her a reason to hate herself.
But a day would come, she realized, when this man wouldn’t matter to her. A day would come when she would fall, tired of fighting the power of his loom and ready to smile again. There will be a lot of regret when the day comes, and she may fall asleep on a tear-stained pillow. But the sky will not fall and she will be better off for it in the end.
Her hands clench the steering wheel as tears begin to trickle down her pink cheeks, her attempt to maintain composure swept away with the reside of her tears. She closes her eyes gently, breathes in, and exhales, shards of pain lenitive in her veins.
She is a red balloon floating toward galaxies above, yearning to climb higher from the people watching beneath, but exploding with ignominious defeat as the barriers of reality and hopefulness collide. She is a dry paint brush, tired of trying to make a masterpiece of nothing and unable to dive into new colors and explore what it’s like to start fresh. She is a sailboat drifting toward the horizon, suddenly torn by harsh winds and incontrollable changes in direction, causing her to sink to lower levels of abandonment. She is scared, jaded, and defeated.
She feels the wheel beneath her hands glide to the left smoothly, wet from strangled tears. A horn blares, rattling her sore mind, but why should she care? It doesn’t matter what happens to her at this point. There isn’t any use in rebuilding something that was never there in the first place.
As white lights flash across her fear-stricken eyes, the first thing she thinks is how she could have made things different.
Author's Chapter Notes:
She hates dreaming because it makes her realize how much she needs him to dream of her, too.
Chapter End Notes:
Jim's side of the story next...hope it was enjoyable!
