Headlights

10 New Year

That's when I could finally breathe.

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She didn't know she could still cry after so many days of moping around in her house like a social outcast. Somehow, her boss had given her a couple days off for New Year's to "celebrate with her family", and now, here she was, stuck still wearing a wine-stained white dress from three days before. If her mother, who had taught her daughters the virtues of appropriate self-presentation, could see her now from across the country, she would be furious.

But again, Hailey thought, her mother would have given her a brand-new tube of lipstick and walked away to leave her with her own demons.

Every single fucking thing in the world reminded her of him.

It was stupid, really, but she still saw him everywhere, even though they had both internally vowed to stay away from each other. Sometimes she saw his eyes in her vase, a gorgeous blown glass piece that he had given her some days before their trip to his family gathering. Other times, she imagined his car pulling into her driveway in the middle of the night. But most of all, she saw him on her commute to the city, no matter where she looked—the graffiti, her fellow pedestrians, the street performers.

She would get over him one day, but not now.

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On the evening of New Year's Eve, she finally took the time to sit down and stare at the state of her house. She didn't know how she had missed all the fliers flung all over her dining table, her coffee table in the living room, her kitchen counter, and her bedroom desk. God, her house was starting to look like Calvin's car before he had gone on a cleaning spree. And Calvin, darling...

She couldn't go down that train of thought now.

She took a deep breath and stood up from the couch, placing her hands on her hips. She would tackle the dining table first. It was almost a sensory overload to stare into the dining room now with the disheveled Christmas tree and the random shit scattered not only on the table but also on the ground.

It was almost painful to sit down at the dining table. She didn't know how the hell she would sort out the bills from the charity letters, which had begun to arrive in mass numbers once it hit December. Her hands hovered over an envelope. It was better to start now than later.

There was a legion of Christmas cards from friends and family. She'd missed so much. There were still cards sent at the beginning of the month. She spent an hour or so laughing at her sister's family picture with her newborn baby boy. And her mother had sent along a package after Christmas, which was an entire set of makeup essentials, with a little card wishing her well in all love and war.

She pushed her mother's note to the side. A phone call on her part was long overdue.

She thought she'd gone through all the Christmas cards that anyone would bother to send her, so she turned her attention to all the letters asking for donations for all sorts of causes. No matter how much she tried, she couldn't truly bring herself to care, even with the pictures of scrawny terriers and malnourished babies in Asia attached to so many of the letters. She was such a terrible person, really, but she pushed on, signing check after check to include in the return envelopes. Her bills would come later.

Thank goodness about half the pile of paper on her table was cleared after she had gone through all the Christmas cards and donation letters. But now there was the business of bills, with which she had not been especially vigilant. God, she hoped she hadn't been late with anything... she hated asking her brother for favors when he had so many issues of his own.