The Sinners We Love |18+

one.

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is anyone still alive? i feel like an alien lol visiting foreign land. it's been some time.

i hope this year is going pleasant for u all. if not, that is okay too :)

In the calmness there was a riveting chaos. The next hours passed like the turmoil inside her body, like a blur that made her nauseous. The ivory sink and beige marble, the milky fabric against her body, everything melted into each other. As if the entire world was one here, so sickeningly homogenous, bereft of any other identity.

Shards of glass remained still beside her, it surprised her how nobody had heard the loud fall. Except for Charlotte, of course, she had broken the glass. It gave her a small hope. Maybe if she tried to escape, to run, maybe, just maybe no one would follow her. No one would even know. But where would she go? Anywhere she'd seek shelter would be a threat for the people there. Moreover, how'd she go? Everywhere Charlotte had laid her eyes, a never ending stretch of lively green had soothed her.

Charlotte had lost the track of time. Now, she was going to lose her mind. Her fingers had trembled, but they didn't cease until the sharp edges touched the dryness of her skin. Out of millions of shards, only one would be enough to end this.

It did not play out like she had watched in movies. Well, life wasn't like any movie at all, after all. It was greater than that. Like a whole universe of its own. But death was familiar. To her. And perhaps to everyone, in some way or the way. The last few seconds. The countdowns and flashbacks. The regrets and remorse. But there was none in this one. There was no sweet nothings and memories that made her want to fight against the urge. In fact, there was no urge at all. It was a silent numbing fear, that someone would do it to her, if she did not.

Even in the absence of a time piece, she could hear the ticks. Her shallow breaths. The tender nerves that always looked like a lighter shade of blue. The sharpness of the glass and sweet scent of chamomile. When the prickling edge touched her skin, tears had blurred her vision.

In an act to see clearly, she had thrown the piece away, in an act to save her life from herself, she had wiped her eyes and tightened her arms around herself. Screeched sobs muffled against her clothing, warmed the cold marble for hours until the wood groaned along with her, and a maid stood outside the bathroom door.

Charlotte looked up to her, in between breaths, and murmured: "I am sorry."

To herself. Always to herself.

The maid-in-waiting did not answer. She had cleaned the bathroom floor, then the already clean sink, cleaned the room, and watered the plants resting on the window sill and left.

There was a wary hurt in being invisible. As if even her death wouldn't make anyone raise their brow. When the cold floor became too familiar, it started to prick her skin. So somewhere along the time, she had fisted her life threatening fingers and walked back to the room. Dried tears that had made a barren patch beneath her eyes when she stumbled upon a blue bag beside the bed. As if, someone had sent some clue to escape, she rummaged the bag only to find her own clothes.

Her fingers grazed the silk, cotton and nylon and everything else that made her clothes, everything she hadn't really paid much attention to, but in that moment, these were the only physical remnants of the normality of her life. Breathy sobs that hurt her chest escaped her mouth, and headache had hugged her closer than ever, when she touched the roughness of worn out papers that remained cocooned inside the pocket of one of her jeans. The crassness of the handwriting painted with faded ink was familiar to her. And in the midst of all the cursed should have's and what if's, there was at least one thing that she had done right. Keeping a bunch of her mother's letters in the back pocket of her jeans, as if to hide it away from the world, as if to protect all the words mum had to say to her, as if they had slid inside the fabric of her jeans knowingly yet unknowingly, and came all the way as if years back mum had known all along that someday Charlotte would need this. And like mum, who couldn't be there for most of the major events in her life, her letters would stubbornly linger behind.