Ratalouis' Extreme Feral Adventure

Ch. 4 Sad Rat Hours

Eleanor wandered down the streets of Paris, not particularly caring about where she was headed or whether she could find her way back. When she found a relatively clean gutter, she crawled into it and released a shaky breath. It was like dropping a glass jar; all the sadness just spilled out of her in fragments.

What have I gotten myself into? Eleanor grieved. She thought about how her relationship with Ratalouis started off as a grand adventure but morphed into a power dynamic in which Ratalouis made all the calls and she simply followed after him. Her every moment of every day was spent either supporting One Direction or giving energy to Ratalouis. She was always the one chasing after him so she could meet his emotional needs and support him in his difficult role as a busy popstar. But, she was left emotionally drained and unsupported. She'd left all her comforts-actually, she'd left everything- for this life, and although Ratalouis treated her with affection, dates, and compliments, she sensed that she didn't have his true respect. The words prissy proper reverberated through her mind. Warm tears began to drip down her fuzzy cheeks. Had she been so submissive, lost so much of her own identity, that Ratalouis thought it was okay for him to treat her like this?

Ugly sorrowful squeaks escaped her mouth. With the combination of their disastrous argument and the fast-approaching world tour, there was likely no way their relationship could recover. In just a few days, the pawp icon would be snatched and whisked away by the call of 1,000 stadiums. She didn't have to analyze a million different dimensions Dr. Strange style to know the constant reality that Ratalouis could no longer be hers. Her chest tightened at that revelation, but acceptance slowly started to filter through her mind. With that sense of clarity, she dried her bleary orbs and made her way out of the gutter and stood out in the open, just observing all of the humans as they walked to and fro. Somehow, being a bystander in life seemed to soothe her soul in the moment; it prompted her to reflect on the simple fact that she existed- a universally shared concept; ultimately, everybody on earth is in various stages of their journey; the man panicking over a phone he dropped down a sewer is facing a moment of despair and the woman getting proposed to in a bistro is experiencing a moment of elation. Eleanor reflected on the fact that her present pain was just one of many steps in her long, growing journey on this Earth, and  that she was not the only soul bearing the burden of heartbreak.