Supernovas & Escapism

Chapter Thirty-Four

      Panic is what I should be feeling, and the expression is clearer on her face right now. It's clear she wants to ask so many questions, but is holding her guard for the time being. Asking the wrong thing will cause me to fly away once more. The last thing she wants is for this situation to be more awkward than it has to be. There's a comfort in the tentative silence that follows, like we're both in a mutual understanding of things that the other could not comprehend.

Glory has always been a bit like this. Reservation towards certain things is what gives her such good footing with most people. Somehow, she's always astounded me with how easily she can dance round people. Every conversation she gets into feels like a carefully constructed tango where she's taking the lead. You don't need to profess your problems for her to understand that there's something under the surface.

Over the years, I'd grown my own avoidance to this nature. By turning my back and walking the other direction, she didn't have much room to snipe. I was an enigma to her, and part of her hated this.

But as we stood on opposite ends of the porch, we had reached this understanding. Words she wanted to say were lost to a wind of silenced expectations. It was so unlike her. With just a few words she could have made this awkward. It's not like she had been blind.

To say that I appreciated this would have been an understatement.

Carefully leaning against the railing, one hand was wrapped round a bottle. It was probably one she had been nursing for quite some time. Her steady composure revealed this much too me.

Everything about her seemed so perfectly poised in this moment. Not like she stepped out of a movie, but more like she had selected the most suitable posture for this. Her arms were folded across the wooden railing as she looked down at me, almost beckoning me to come up and join her.

"You alright?" she asked with a subtle softness to her tone.

Regardless of what my own answer was, her response would be the same. A quiet noise of understanding and a slow, tempered nod of her head.

My feet were stinging like hell right now, but not something that I couldn't walk off. Souls were built to carry burdens, and bodies were made to trod through life, no matter the weather. The blood had dried up fairly quickly once they'd stopped colliding with the hard, jagged edges of the sidewalk, but it still hurt. Each step forward seemed weighted down by the pain of earlier today.

But she wasn't really talking about my physical state of being. More so, she was talking about my head. She wanted to know if there was any permanent damage done. All she needed from me was a confirmation of where I stood.

The problem with that was that I certainly had no idea where the hell I was.

Half the time it felt like I was standing at the jaws of infinity, waiting for a black hole to swallow me up and make escape from life impossible. The other half felt like I was in the eye of a hurricane; having made it through a painful experience, and just waiting for the other foot to eventually drop on me.