"Just love her... Love will always win."
Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong but rejoices in the...
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THEIR RIDE home is a blur in Hope's mind. It must have involved a chestnut Uber, some background music and Alice's comforting silence.
She continues to stare ahead, exhausted but unable to retire. She feels as if an old — yet fresh — wound has been stripped of the upper coat that signaled of its healing, causing fresh blood to pour out once again.
All the images are so fresh in her mind. Images of the night she has wanted to forget since it happened and images of the nights before that, which she has lived her entire life pretending they never happened. The pain is raw as it hits her, like balls of tennis, one after another.
Every other minute, a new detail of the night pops up in her mind and she watches, unable to stop it, as it replays in front of her like a screen play. She watches herself, as if from a different perspective, as she walks into the party. She doesn't blink, nor does she swallow the pain, just peers almost indifferently as she walks into the party, her red dress hugging her in all the right places.
For a long time, she had never been one to do colors but that night, she wanted to make a statement. She never wanted to stay in the shadows.
"For once, she wanted to step out." Hope suddenly says, unaware of her third person reference. If Alice makes a sound, she doesn't hear it. If Alice moves, she doesn't notice it. She just continues to stare ahead at nothing in particular and continues. "She had stayed in the shadows for far too long. For one night, she didn't just want to see people, she wanted to be seen too."
Her limbs begin to ache from how she's seated but she doesn't move an inch. The pain in her limbs, even though completely incomparable to the one echoing inside her, causes her a moments distraction.
In that moment of distraction, she notices the familiar surrounding and the familiar couch she's sat on, a shawl she certainly didn't have draped over her and a cup of tea steaming right next to her. She doesn't pay much thought to anything. She just observes, from an outsider's point of view, just as she observes her memories.
"She was forbidden from going out at such a late hour but she insisted, saying that now highschool was over, she wanted to experience this. It is true what they say, experience is the best teacher." She says, her posture unchanging, her face unchanging. She narrates this story as she would narrate some news if she were a news anchor. "So she wore a seductive red dress. She drunk and flirted and laughed at the silliness of it all."
The laughter she was recalling was like a ghost. One she could see and hear but couldn't touch. One she wanted to keep holding onto like grains of sand but no matter how tight her grip was, the grains would still slip through and she'd be left holding nothing.
"For a short moment, she had began to see why people liked the parties. The high, the energy, the adrenaline, the daring nature. It was all so consuming, until she drunk some tequila herself."
