Orange Juice

Chapter Twenty-Six

 Sunny watched the sky go from deep and dark to dim and light outside her motel window. Don had previously offered to pay and check her in, and she had been lying awake in her bed since she claimed the room.

 Despite her exhaustion and lack of will to do anything, she could not get one second of sleep.

 She just lay there on the mattress with her head on the soft pillow, drifting in and out of reality, going back and forth between awareness and detachment. She allowed herself to float out of her skin and lose the sensation of what was actual and what was not.

 In fact, staying up had her questioning what is truly classified as realism and where the line of fiction was drawn. What was an illusion of the mind and what was a true state of reality?

 Indulging in those thoughts gave her some form of uneasy peace. It was too much to comprehend in such a way that it distracted her from the painful actualities by drowning her in the complexities.

 Lizzy was really gone. So what? A man is looking to marry her by force. So what? Both their lives were in danger. So what? What even made life that valuable, to begin with? It was just a cycle of mystery, yet she was always giving it explanations to cure the ache in her head that questioned all the little details perhaps a bit too deeply. But explaining the rules of the unknown just made it boring. It stripped life of its spontaneous spark and made many things seem meaningless.

 Then it was in fact true; ignorance was bliss and awareness was a curse.

 All the distractions were bound to end and she would always find herself falling off the edge of simple existence.

 That made her wonder; did she love Lizzy, or did she love the escapism she got from that love? She thought of that, and she thought of what love really meant.

 Love; experience, history, security, lust, anticipation, connection, admiration, acceptance, understanding, and interest.

 That was the best explanation she could come up with. And then it hit her like a gush of stormy wind; she did not need an explanation when she was around her. She never even tried to seek one. She loved her because she just did, even though she fit into every other category of love's definition. But it did not matter, because it did not have to fit; it was just there.

 And it was so simple. And it was so complex. And it was so full of pleasure that it ended in so much pain.

 Daylight filtered through the window and the half-open honey-colored curtain, and she could see all the tiny specs of dust floating around. She wondered if her Lizzy had gotten any sleep and hoped that she did.

 Sunny wished that if this parting was bound to happen she could have at least given Lizzy the song that sat unread by anyone but her in the brown flowery notebook.

 Reaching over to pull it out of her bag that sat on the floor, she fluttered the pages open, allowing the faint smell of parchment to fill her empty senses.

 Reading them now, the lyrics seemed almost bitterly ironic. She shut the notebook, plopping back on the bouncy mattress of the motel room bed tiredly.

 Then, a soft knock sounded on the door, "Hello?" Kyle said from behind the door.

 Sunny straightened back up tiredly before walking over to get the door, "Coming." she said from inside.

 Unlocking and opening the door, she was greeted by Don who held two mugs of steaming tea in either of his hands, "Good morning." he said. Sunny managed a smiled, though she failed to hide the dark circles under her eyes, "Hey, good morning."