Love is Madness

3: Salt in the Skÿ with Diamonds

3: Salt in the Skÿ with Diamonds

Three months earlier.

Lissa drove along the deserted highway, singing her heart out to the random tracks that belted out of her truck. It was her way of practising, fine tuning her voice by having the music change abruptly halfway through a line.

Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes, And she's gone, Lucy in the sky with dia-,

Darkness was falling. She was late getting home to her mumma and her cats. Then the music switched to Never Let Me Go, Florence + The Machines, and it made her cry.

Oh freaking fan-bloody-tastic, she moaned silently. His song just has to come on, forgot I had the stupid thing on there, and I'm frigging driving too!

Can't see now, through the bloody tears.

Stupid, stupid, Lissa cursed through the abrupt and irrational tears that coursed down her face, thinking, why won't the song just change already? She couldn't reach over and turn it off. The forward button was broken. Mikhael had stabbed it too far in. The silence would be worse, would drive her mental with its emptiness.

And freaking driving on top of that! It was an insane reaction, to the song, but the haunting lyrics just brought back too many images, memories, thoughts, pictures, pictures, freaking blatant technicolour remembering.

Now she remembered all his other songs, random lines and chords and tracks, bursting into her head at full volume, merging into a ball of aching regret. Sometimes she could handle it, could maybe even listen to the whole song, but not when they took her by surprise. Not when the date was almost perfectly the same. Not when it was almost perfectly nine years ago that he'd died.

The song still hadn't moved on, and would she ever, she thought sadly. She would have to pull over soon, from the blinding tears that blurred her eyes. To die in a car smash because she couldn't see while listening to one of her daddy's songs would just be so frigging ironic that she would just have to-

Damn it!

She stomped on the brakes and swore in a melodious foreign language and choked back a sob. Then she got out and slammed the door, violently. It was slightly pathetic, really, her knee-jerk reaction to freaking music, her eyes filling up so bad that she couldn't see, could barely breathe.

It began to rain. Lissa tipped her head back and let the icy drops hit her in the face. She breathed out deeply past the sorrow in her throat, forgot to breathe back in. The rain wasn't enough, it couldn't wash away the hurt. Even if it hit you in the eyes. Even if you held out your hands and tried to catch it, it was never enough.

She was a strange spectacle, though, standing in the headlights of her car, in the light drizzle, head tipped up and her hair loose and dark, arms curved like a ballerina, like she was beginning a rain dance.

papai suck, she decided, like ducks. Great big hairy fucking fucks and all their fuckiness.

Whoops. There goes another five in the swear jar.

She swiped at her face angrily, but the tears wouldn't stop. It was so long since she'd seen her dad. Pulled on his curls, fell asleep to his scottishy-welsh brogue, ate half a batch of his stupidly delicious drunken angelcakes- She missed him, and her momma missed him more, and that made her try to forget her dad. Else they both look at each other and see their own helplessness reflected.

And then that bastardly song turns up!

She knew, somewhere in the back of the small part of the logical side of her brain, that her father had known and sung and loved over three thousand other songs, and he was always making music when she was small and he was alive and that she shouldn't react like this.