Hello, Again

Chapter 3 (Part 2)

The Sadness felt just as prickly.

Somehow, moving to New York  hadn't helped her cause – it was just as big and noisy and frightening as she'd found it, possibly even more with each passing day, further still from being the kingdom she'd envisaged in particularly moody fits. Being the Practical Girl that she was, she'd dropped all ideas of being an authoress for the time being and taken up architecture instead, up for nights on end studying principles and standards that didn't quite seem familiar despite tedious repetition, her own design projects foreign to her as she felt the (temporarily) new-found enthusiasm slip, bit by bit, each day. Despite her startlingly romantic, dreamy predisposition, Amelia was the sort of person who'd take prudential decisions and stick by them come hail or storm. However, passion wasn't one to be tied up and put on a leash, expected to comply with the life plan of a twenty two year old simply because it was practical. In an effort to set things right, she decided to let her heart do the talking, taking the leap in a wholly different matter in her life.

The result had been Jason.

On a breezy day in March, she'd woken up at seven in the morning, startled awake by how cold she was, to an empty bed, in a strange, sterile apartment that held no belongings of hers. She had stretched and laid for almost ten minutes, waiting for him to return from the bathroom, listening intently to the absolute silence, her desperation growing as she strained her ears for anything, the patter of water over ceramic tiles, the ticking of the hands of his expensive wristwatch (that she'd got him on his birthday), the sound of footsteps in the kitchen or hallway, but the silence stretched, longer and louder and deafening until she wished she could melt into the mattress and never be found again.

She stared at the ceiling, the realization sinking in, feeling her fingers turn numb and Sadness wash over her when she finally attempted to get off the bed. Imagining the creaking of her limbs, she patted down her side of the bed, smoothening the dull grey sheets and arranging the pillows, hoping to catch sight of a yellow (customary) post-it at the very least, and finding none, she arranged his side of the bed too, and picked up her clothes off the floor. She dressed herself carefully, pulling on her favourite blue dress and focusing on the cold, snug fit of the fabric, taking deep breaths and trying to shake off the desolation that had enveloped her from the moment she'd woken up.

Sunday mornings hadn't always been so horrid.

She let herself out of his apartment, fighting the urge to give him a call – she hoped to hear that he'd had to leave because of an Emergency, that there was a patient who demanded that he be operated upon by Doctor Finch, a complication that no one but he could solve – anything for him to be proven noble and selfless and that it was all her fault, because she'd found the hard way that she could handle being wrong far better than being right.

Instead, however, she walked with her jacket slung over her arm, down the steps from his apartment and onto the street, the cold air greeting her far more warmly than his empty apartment in the mornings ever did.

In the years to come, Amelia would look upon this time and shudder at how frequently she skirted the edge of the abyss, and how stupid all of it had been. She was quite literally wasting away over a boy, a boy and a poem and four years of her life she couldn't get back and a job two years in the future that she already hated.

Except, the job would pay her bills and more, her four years would mean nothing in the most reassuring way, and the boy would tell her to write another one when she'd fret over a scribbled-over napkin that dropped out of her coat pocket.

It was in this dishevelled, dismayed state that Sarah Montgomery found her.

Bumping into her (quite literally), Sarah took a look at her and shrieked loudly in excitement, giving her a hug and asking unintelligible questions even as Amelia tried to find her bearings. It was somewhere around the third question, whatever it might've been, that Sarah noticed something was off.