004 - Prompt

[stardoll]

A photo prompt! To spare your Friends Pages, I'm putting it under a Cut.

Comments

[laren]

THIS ONE IS HARD. I RESENT YOU.

[stardoll]

I'll have an easier one tomorrow! XD

[redolent]

With the apartment still smelling like her and many of her things still strewn about, it wasn’t until I went to the bedroom and saw the closet empty of her clothes, or the medicine cabinet without her deodorant and face creams and toothpaste and nail polish that it all became real to me again. She was gone. She had been gone for exactly twelve weeks, which made it 3 months. Three whole moon cycles had passed since I had seen her face, heard her laugh, felt her sleeping next to me.

A lot has changed since then – since I called her a cheating whore and opened that bottle before her footfalls even quieted in the hallway. I lost my job. I’m on probation. I have 80 hours of community service. If you had known me before all this happened, you would think I was shitting you, but now I probably just sound like every other loser you’ve ever heard about. How could you know I always, always do the right thing? How could you know I graduated high school at the top of my class and went directly to college, where I also excelled? After college, I got a job in my field and worked my ass off for the next ten years paying student loans. I paid my bills. I lived within my means. I had a savings account. I didn’t do anything to excess – not even love her.

When I think about it, we were destined to fail from the beginning. She was a painter who moonlighted as a waitress, if she felt like it. She used to tell me there was gypsy blood in her spirit and that only didn’t matter to me when we were fucking. It was her poetic way of telling me I was treating her like she wasn’t good enough, I guess. Most of the time, it did matter to me that she had little ambition. I didn’t understand why she couldn’t tidy the house or do the washing up. I was working over 40 hours a week, making more money in a week than she’d make in two months and she couldn’t do…anything? Well, she did things. There was this one time she decided she was going to cook lobster for dinner, but she didn’t bother to read the recipe before she bought the lobster. So I come home and she’s crying in a heap on the kitchen floor, while a pot of abandoned water boils on the stove and two lobsters are clacking their claws on the counters, looking for places to hide. It would seem like that story sums up the whole of our relationship. I have so many stories where she’s the hapless, bumbling girlfriend and I have to ride in on my white horse and save her.

I have bled and scabbed and healed and bled again and then turned every scar into a joke. Since she left, I have fought and fucked and talked and fought again. I have sat around and cried and laughed until I choked. All that time, something was sitting with its hands on either side of its face, screaming and screaming and screaming. I know I should pull myself together, but do you know how hard it is to look away from her? Tell me how to negate all the good for the vile, emotional battles this past summer. Christ, what the fuck happened? It’s all falling in on me. It’s all glass shards and the bullshit of having to buy new windows. I had said there would be no explosions, but I smell the burning of us still.

For awhile, I thought for sure I’d hear from her again. She would at least come to get the rest of her belongings. For the life of me, I cannot imagine why I thought she would do that. ‘It’s all just stuff’, she would tell me, with that wide grin of hers. That’s probably why her voice mail caught me by surprise. While I was waiting for my 4 hours of picking up trash in the park to be signed off, I checked my phone. I heard her voice and the whole world stopped. She wanted to talk. I was to meet her at the train station. There was no opportunity to go home and shower or change clothes. If I was going to be on time, I had to head that direction immediately. Five minutes from my destination, I saw I had about ten minutes to spare. Stopping at the flower stand, I grabbed three perfect white roses. All she would have to do was look at them to know I had grown in so many different directions since she had left that neither of us would recognize me anymore. A guy doesn’t buy white roses for a cheating whore, does he?

He might as well. Because I was there and she never showed.

It’s a long bus ride home.

[icedark_elf]

Title: Flowers on a Train
Author: Katrina
Fandom: Final Fantasy VII
Characters: Zack/Aeris
Words: 808
Rating: PG

Flowers on a Train AO3 link
Flowers on a Train DW Link

Slowly working my way through the list. I got a loooong way to go.