Hello, Again

Chapter 3 (Part 3)

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Give me a reason to get out of the city
~~~

Some nights, Amelia would stay up and paint pretty pictures in her head.

Some nights, it would feel as if her very bones were on fire, her skin hot and cold at the same time, as the beating of her heart would get louder and louder until she could no longer tell if it was the music blaring from her earphones or her heart that seemed to make everything shudder rhythmically. Her head would pound and her eyes would burn and ache as she'd lie in tangled in her blankets, looking out of her window at where the stars should be, revelling instead in the warm glow of the streetlamps and the strange noises of the city, at the moon that almost always never appeared and the breeze that had stopped blowing a long time ago.

On these nights, she could almost feel the spirit within her wanting to rip out and fly away among the sulphur laden clouds, away from the large bed and the empty apartment and the half full closet, away from little else, away from the insignificance of her life, screaming and writhing until it felt truly alive.

Such strange, unearthly urges would always, always follow a day spent in utter desolation; Amelia spent her time moving from one task to another, completing each with a lack of involvement and level of skill that astounded her (whenever she did deign to notice), almost comical in how much the result didn't interest her, her attention freely given instead to the strange numbness in her palms and the knot in her chest, the strange ache in her feet and that damned emptiness.

The self-help columns on the incognito tabs called it anxiety.

Amelia called it Sadness.

The funny thing about Sadness was that it didn't quite attack you like a vicious beast of prey, spinning its web around your chest for years and years instead, watching you get infinitesimally more breathless with each passing second, biding its time in the shadows until sheer hopelessness brought you down. Almost unavoidably, it became one's companion – often the only –  the sort of poison that killed you a little every night as one stared up at the ceiling in the dark trying to remember what happiness felt like.

These were the kind of thoughts that flitted in and out of Amelia's head on the evening of the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a couple hours before she was expected to make an appearance.

But this isn't an account of the misery that Amelia wallowed in every once in a while. If anything, it's a story of youth and of life and the love one inevitably gives and receives, and Emily Gilbert walked to her friend's apartment in the Upper East thinking of much the same, her nicest pair of heels packed up in her satchel in a roll of cellophane, her boyfriend's baggy denim jacket hiding most of her shimmery green dress.

On June 20th 2009, Amelia brought Jason to her apartment for the first time.

On March 20th 2011, Amelia met Adam McAlister at Sarah Montgomery's studio loft.

On February 21st 2015, Amelia attended an art exhibition with Emily at the Met.

In all probability, however, this could've been Emily's story as easily as it was Amelia's and Adam's – in the June of 2011 she met George Connelly on DateMyCollege and discovered within an hour of their conversation that he was not the One, and two years later, in March, she moved in with him and his golden retriever Brutus, her previous impression of him all but forgotten. Through an objective state of mind, this might as well have been the story of the woman who walked three paces behind Emily, or the aged man across the street, or the young girl brooding in her room three blocks away – each carrying a unique burden – but most people (unlike Adam) didn't quite think that way, and for most part, this remains the story of Adam and Amelia, and possibly, even Emily.