PEARL

SIXTEEN

TRACK 16
I DON'T KNOW HOW TO LOVE
THE DRUMS

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finally - a filler that isn't too long.
tw for brief mention of anorexia

IDA was approaching the ground floor bathroom that surely had some poignancy etched onto its oddly pretty pink tiles as well as occasional minor marker pen violations from Nate, and the distant glint of what was left of its shattered mirror caught her eye through the ajar door.

Said glint reminded Ida that it was the week anniversary of her entering the hospital's high gates (because that wordplay wasn't wearing thin at all), which in turn meant that it had been a week since losing her earrings, meeting Nathan Gold and giving film studios far and wide a field day by escaping with him and his friends for a night of DIY drugs – only to promptly rain all over said field day by having sex with him the following morning and continuing to do so for five days.

Rain on its pearl-encrusted parade or not, Hollywood must've been nearly foaming at the mouth that Thursday, because to recycle a metaphor and help out the probably debt-piled writer hunched over her keyboard, it seemed that there was yet another hole in Ida Bluestone's character quilt.

The least the person holding the clapboard or nursing a neck cramp could do was be consistent.

Anyone on the other side of the blue-silver screen with a grounded sense of reality and no pair of rose-tinted lens to their name would've attributed this second hole (which was busy keeping Ida's strong feelings regarding misdiagnosis company) to the Prozac she'd been prescribed over the past few days (much to the delight of her tepid mother and telephone aunt, no doubt.)

They would've said that this medicine, aided and abetted by the start of the unsurprisingly shitty group therapy sessions she'd been warned about, was the cause of the wholly uncharacteristic yet skull-crushingly inevitable –

Well, Ida hated to term it fondness, or anything else close to camera-coveted love.

Normality, she supposed she could call it, silver-shadowed or not: the growing normality of Nate Gold and his Neptune eyes, and his brown sugar hands and bedroom without a window.

Either that, or: the gradual crumbling of the fine line between distraction and something a little less than desire, meaning that lifting lash from freckled-starred cheek to greet the cracks in Nate's ceiling come dawn was becoming progressively more comfortable than callous.

Or even: the way that frequent sex with Nate was beginning to rebel against Ida's perception of the overdone act as something usually disappointing and short, despite being sprinkled with enough Hollywood dust to make you sneeze, which simultaneously makes and breaks relationships that will end up on the silver-blue rocks like ships subjected to siren song anyway.

And this was because the way he touched her on his starched bedsheets bore some of Micah and Rowan's teenage grove-grasping tenderness.

Perhaps the simplest and most Wallflower way of putting it was that aside from the weed-beneath-broken-suicide-proof-window-substituting sex, Ida kept getting distracted.

By thinking about Nate.

(Between you and me, the medicine wasn't a miracle worker – it may have been raising Ida a few inches out of the cesspit as each day went by, scraping the cynical scales from her eyes, but that wasn't to say that she was suddenly spitting on her razor blade mentality and head over Mary Janed heels for Nate, or that she no longer sometimes found herself lying in futility's lap and feeling as suffocated as if either the pearls of Lily's grandmother's broken necklace had been rammed down her throat or the bare string had been tightened around it, turning her lips as bluestone as her exploited surname.