The Burning of the Palace at Versailles (or, Butterfly) [REWRITING]

Chapter 3 - The Bottom of the Bottle

Despite being twenty-one, before Melody's father had died, she had only tasted alcoholic drinks. She had never enjoyed any of them. Most of them were too bitter, some of them tasted dry— she never understood because why on earth would someone choose to drink something that tasted dry— and some of them had too many foul spices. So despite her friends having cupboards full of cheap wines and liquors, Melody never drank more than a glass of anything. Even when her father had come back from a business trip with a bottle of real, authentic sake, she had found it unpleasant to taste. So, Melody was not a drinker, much to the disappointment of her friends.

But that was before her father had died.

It had happened at night after the sun had gone down. Melody was graduating soon, and she had a paper due in two days. Her internship at the Gazette, which would eventually turn into a job, was always on the back of her mind. It was like the calm before the storm: the only sounds in her small apartment kitchen were the clicking of her typing, the muffled sound of a roommate's television, and another roommate on the phone. Then Melody's phone rang with a phone call that would shatter the silence and shatter Melody's world.

Melody missed her graduation. The funeral happened three weeks after the night he died. Melody and her mother split the ashes— half would go to Japan, symbolically returning him to the place of his birth. The other half was entrusted to Melody. She brought them to her father's garden at their childhood home. In the time since his death, when Melody's world had been draped in black and death, some of the plants had wilted. The warm, late spring air smelled like daffodils— Melody thought of the famed face of Narcissus, a face so beautiful that it had ended lives— as it swirled around her head and ruffled the ends of her black hair.

There, in the garden he had loved so much, Melody placed the ashes of her father. That night, she used some of the money she had earned from her new job, money that should have been spent on her rent, or her student loans, or really anything else that she could have spent it on. But instead, she went to a corner market armed with only her driver's license and her debit card and bought a bottle of the cheapest liquor the store had for sale. Then she went back to the house she had grown up in and pulled herself to her bedroom. She could hear her mother somewhere in the house, crying and sobbing. Melody thought maybe she should go to her, to try and help her. But then she pressed her back against the wall, painted blue like the ocean when she was nine years old, and sank to the floor with the bottle pressed into her hands.

She drank an impressive amount of it that night, then woke up the next morning in her childhood bed with a churning in her stomach and a raging headache. That day, her mother, with red but dry eyes, didn't ask what happened, and Melody never told her. The day following was her first day in the field as a true reporter, and she tried to put the drink behind her. But not three days later, she went back to the corner market and bought another bottle. After the second bottle, Melody and her mother moved her into an apartment with the roommate who had watched the man jump from the roof on the day of her prison sentencing.

Melody kept trying to tell herself over the days that followed that she was starting over. That she was moving on from the death of her best friend, and truest companion. That everything she was going through was normal and healthy. But deep down, she knew it wasn't, knew that anything she did wasn't normal or healthy.

Still, she tried to hide it. She threw herself into her work, quickly rising through the ranks enough that she could go into the field to do investigative journalism. She forced herself to get out of bed on the days when she felt low. She pinched herself when her mania wanted her to go and buy everything in a store. She even started to go on dates with someone from work. He was the one who, after they finally broke up, with him saying she was too high-maintenance and too high-strung, started dating another girl and had a baby.