afterparty | sapnap

talking

It had taken another two hours to arrive to Atlanta after the incident with the creepy gas station attendant. Aria was glad to leave him in the dust.

As it was only five in the morning when they'd arrived and everyone (besides Dante, bless him) was asleep, they just parked the bus in a Walmart parking lot. Aria was the first to wake up, at 6:45.

Her first order of business was to check the schedule. She did wake up from a disturbing dream about that guy from that gas station, so she was a little confused and distracted. Pulling up the screenshot of the drawn up schedule for North America, she quickly found the Atlanta date. the show was set to begin at 7 pm.

Aria wasn't in the best mood. Maybe it was what happened last night, maybe it was the dream, but she could tell already that today wasn't going to be very good. She was having a depressive mood swing.

When she was depressed, she didn't feel much of anything. It was like there had been a blockage on her emotions. One of the things they had been working on before she quit therapy was to find healthy coping mechanisms, or perhaps something that might pull her out of her mood swings. However, she had yet to find anything that genuinely worked.

So, until then, she decided she would pass time by watching some Netflix. She decided on rewatching Shameless.

The time had passed relatively quickly until it was 10 am and everyone was awake. She could hear them moving around in the front of the bus through her headphones.

"Aria? Are you awake?"

The words were so muted by the sound of Fiona Gallagher screaming that she doubted that she even heard it at all, but she opened her curtain just to check.

Standing there was Joe, who was smiling broadly. "Hey."

"Hi." she spoke, waiting for him to say something.

"I, uh, was just checking to see if you were awake. The guys want to go downtown to have a look around. Are you coming?" he said, after a few moments.

She looked down. She knew that it was something that she should probably want to do, but all she could think about was all the energy it was going to take up, and how heavy her body felt. She could barely even believe that she was going to go perform for two hours later.

"Go without me." she said.

"Are you sure? I mean, we never have this much free time before the show, and-"

"Joe." she snapped. It wasn't normal for her to do so, but she never really cared when she was having a mood swing. "I'm not going."

He looked down. "Okay."

She knew it made him upset. She knew that it hurt him when she spoke in such a way. And there was a small part of her that felt a pang of guilt when it happened, which was a lot, because Joe always pushed it when she was feeling this way. And even though she knew all of this, the only thing she could really do for the time being was roll back over and unpause Netflix.

Soon after, it was quiet in the bus. There was no shaking, no background noise, no nothing. Even though she had declined to go, she still felt worse when everyone was gone. Then she remembered Nick. He had asked her to text him when she got to Atlanta.

Closing the Netflix app, she opened up their messages. She stared at the last message he had sent. A simple Emoji.

He was going to want to start a conversation. And it's not like she didn't want to talk to him, it's just that she had a bad feeling that she may not be like herself. She didn't want to disappoint him.

hey we got to atlanta
a few hours ago i
only just remebered
that i was supposed
to text you. sorry