The City | GirlxGirl

six ➳

There was pain coated in her blood; aching bones that never seemed to heal. None of it was foreign to Skylar. She worked long, late shifts. Always busy—always doing something. On her two days off each week, she lounged around her house, rarely with a person she'd met at the bar and sometimes with Blair. Most often alone.

An introvert at heart, but with an extrovert's needs. Staying in the house alone for too long drove her crazy. The walls seemed to move closer and closer to each other, the silence suddenly all she could hear. On days like that, she opened her bedroom window, lit a cigarette, and blew the smoke into the frigid air. She liked watching her neighbours, but didn't like them watching her.

The blinds in her bedroom were closed, but as she pulled herself out of bed—realizing that half the day was gone, at 2:23PM—she reluctantly opened them, giving her suburban neighbourhood view into her house. There wasn't much to see. A bed that was never made, a stack of books that, for some reason, she was always given as gifts, and would probably never read. A keyboard pushed into the corner beside the closed door, which she hadn't touched in years.

If anyone was to look inside her room right now, they'd think she was depressed. She'd lost interest in things she used to love; but she called that growing up. And she called not making her bed every day a time-saver: she liked immediately collapsing into untucked sheets after long, cold nights.

She wasn't depressed. She was a bartender—and not even a good one. Years ago, before her father had passed, shortly after her mother, he had asked her if she had a plan. They'd helped her buy a house and make it into a home. Her father had painted the walls even while he was sick.

Skylar didn't have a plan. She never did, really. Never a high school outcast, she wasn't popular, but had spent the monotonous days with a group of other girls, she didn't have many aspirations following her grade twelve graduation. And now she had lost contact with all of those girls, although she didn't count that as a huge loss.

She used to think she hadn't found herself yet. And then she realized that she had: she was Skylar, the bartender, best friend of Blair, lover of the TFC. Stubborn, sleepy, easily irritated. Despite the flaws in that definition of herself, it was undeniable.

Skylar let the steam of her hot shower dance amongst the cold tiles that sheltered her small bathroom, humming to herself as she felt relief of some of her bodily pain. She was always tired, but today she wasn't nearly as exhausted as usual. Feeling re-energized although feeling her skin forming wrinkles from being in the shower too long, she stepped out, turned it off, and wrapped a towel around herself.

After pulling on black denim jeans and a sweatshirt, she searched her bathroom counter and cabinet for her hairbrush. Always on the counter, beside her toothbrush and messy tube of toothpaste, or else she'd forget where she put it. Like now.

After three fully healed concussions, Skylar experienced severe headaches. And on top of the addition of pain to her poor body, she struggled with her short-term memory. If she put something in the wrong place, she'd spend hours trying to remember where she had left it—but that wasn't it. She could deal with misplaced hairbrushes. The greatest impact of it was being told something by a friend, or a date, and a moment later, completely forgetting it. Some words weren't properly encoded in her short-term memory, and would never make it to the long-term. Blair had plenty of experience with this, and even though she was fully aware that it was not under Skylar's control, she became frustrated with her at times.

Not like when Skylar had called her boyfriend Patrick instead of Peter. Skylar had been told the name plenty of times—enough times to have it fully encoded in her long-term memory (which, honestly, she wished hadn't been the case). It was more like Blair telling her that she had to cancel their plans for a night two days down the road, and Skylar not writing it down. Two days later, she'd call Blair, annoyed that the blonde had stood her up.