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 Posted: Sun May 01, 2016 11:24 pm
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It was May, which meant it was finals season, and that threaded a certain note of tension across the campus grounds. It even got to Lily Babineaux, ever consistent as she was in her academic mediocrity--it was hard not to get swept up in the tide of hushed whispers and frayed edges and feel a sense of harrowed community. That was what college was about, right? Suffering among friends?
Lily was not particularly worried about her finals, of course. The chips would fall where they fell, and she wasn't going to make up for a semester of lax studying in a single night. She had always been a solid-B-minus student anyway, and when she thought about her GPA she just heard her mother's chipper voice, thousands of miles away. Oh, don't you worry Lily, Cs get degrees, it will all be just fine. But as chill as she wanted to be, there was an itch under her skin that she just couldn't scratch, a nagging sense of urgency that she couldn't banish with meditations or self-care or early morning walks on the beach.
On the day of her last final, she felt the fear of her impending future for the first time, and it got her out of bed in time for her nutrition exam. The words dawdled and danced on her page, as if to mock her for the sudden shift in anxiety, but Lily was better than a bunch of a*****e letters. She worked for this exam, felt like maybe this one might even be a B-plus performance. It had been multiple choice, how hard was that to mess up? She'd double checked her bubbles, made sure her Bs and Ds weren't mixed up. But no matter what she told herself, her bones stayed in perpetual 'nails on a chalkboard' feeling, and it was only worse the longer she stayed inside.
The air outside was hardly better, too stagnant to be refreshing, but it was preferable to a room that smelled like not-enough-tax-dollars. The campus itself was pretty enough, especially on days like this when she had the chance to cut through the green. On a mission to get home and find herself a good shavasana, she kept her eyes low to the ground, but the sight of a gnarled root caught her attention enough to draw her eyes up
and up
and up, where the tree's sturdy branches reached for the sky.
Lily stopped mid-step, her eyes fixated on the little nook made by the initial forking of the trunk. It looked cozy enough, and considering the option of a peaceful reverie nestled in the tree's arms was enough to shirk the jitters from her, like sloughing off a scratchy wool coat. There were footholds there, and there, and if she just managed to toss her backpack up there first...
Lily blinked, and shook her head, suddenly aware of the other passing students. She needed to get home and not just stand there, staring at trees. After all, she had precious little time to develop her next video before classes started, and she still had nothing in terms of her ideas.
She left the tree behind, and tried not to notice the strain it put on her to do so.
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Posted: Sat May 07, 2016 10:25 am
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Posted: Sat May 07, 2016 11:47 am
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The ground is dangerous.
It is vast and greedy, clawing always with its deadly pull, and it drags her down, down, down. Her limbs are heavy, her feet are heavy, and they plod on the earth's surface, step after step. The sky is dark, starless but open, if only she could reach it. There is weight holding her down, dark arms and tendrils that clasp to her feet, her legs, tearing at flesh just to drag it down. Her arms are free, if only for a moment, and she grasps at air-turned-steel, her only anchor against the devouring tide. Her body aches, and the ground screeches in fury, but she pulls herself against the draw of gravity, up to what feels safe. Up to where she belongs.
Lily found herself stirring to consciousness in a place that was neither her bed nor even vaguely horizontal. When her eyes opened, most of what she saw was the veil of dark hair covering her face, but through that and the dim light she saw her bare arms, curled around bars. She frowned--Lily was at least seventy-five percent sure this was not where she'd put herself before falling asleep. She had finished her paper, emailed it in a whole two hours before it was due, and then gone straight to bed, exhausted from the cumulative stress of her all-nighter. She'd planned on nothing but sleeping for the next two days, if that's what it took to ******** the jitters in her head.
"What the fuuuuck," she murmured slowly, untangling her limbs from what she quickly realized was a ladder. She was inside, thankfully, given that she was wearing only a nightie, in what appeared to be some storage closet. The lights were off, but the door was creaked open, and outside she could see the familiar drab wallpaper of her apartment complex.
The wheels in her head turned, and Lily pieced together where she was--at the end of her hall, she passed the maintenance closet every day on the way to her door. She'd never seen the inside of it, never even bothered to check if they kept the door locked, because it had never been relevant to her interests, but just last week a light had gone out on her floor and the handyman had spent hours fixing it, blocking the way with his big steel ladder. They had vaulted ceilings, one of the few luxuries afforded to the place, which meant it had enough rungs for Lily to be draped across and not touch the floor. Without thinking, her left arm began to drift upwards towards the next one, as if climbing would be the fastest way back to bed.
"What the actual ********," she murmured to herself, pins and needles in her body as she slowly lowered herself down. Lily was not known for sleepwalking, and certainly nothing to this extreme--she could see where she'd stumbled over a tarp and knocked over various tools and bottles and cans, though it was possible it had always been that dirty. Furtively, she stepped one foot over the other to avoid the mess, hands clasped on the threshold as she peered out into the hallway.
For once, at least, her neighbors seemed to be quietly sleeping. Finals had a funny way of sapping the life out of everyone. Already, though, she could feel that itch in her spine, her fingers, her toes, telling her she needed to be higher, she needed to be off the ground. Lily groaned, rubbing her eyes. She did not have the energy for this s**t.
It was more of a drag than a walk, but she forced herself down the hallway, noting in the wan light that her bare feet were spattered in a color matching the walls. Had she knocked over a paint can in there? She hadn't noticed at first, but she could feel the sticky tar of half-dried paint on her soles and between her toes. "s**t," she muttered darkly, "What the s**t, Lily."
Thankfully, though, unconscious-Lily had been forward thinking enough to leave the door to her apartment open, and she plodded slowly into the dark living room with shrugged shoulders and a wave of exhaustion. She locked the door behind her, and after a thought, dead-bolted it too, staring hard at the knob as if she might be able to intimidate it into doing its job better. Her bed sounded wonderful, but it was so far away, and dimly she remembered that she wouldn't want to get paint on her sheets, those were still vaguely knew. The couch was closer, a hand-me-down from a garage sale, and most importantly she only had to take three steps to get to it. She dropped gracelessly onto the worn cushions and let the sleep drape over her, hoping this time it only took her to dreams. She could shower in the morning, when she felt more alive and everything didn't ache and itch.
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Posted: Sat May 07, 2016 11:52 am
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Posted: Wed May 11, 2016 11:19 am
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Lily awoke, sprawled out on the couch where she shouldn't have been, arms and legs tumbled over the sides while her torso just barely fit. She stretched, and her lats ached, a twinge of tightness that seized her back and made her grunt. Her feet met ground, and she could still see the splatters of paint on her toes, the imprints of footsteps on her tile floor. So that part, at least, was real.
Rubbing at the growing pain in her head, Lily stumbled up from the couch, nearly staggering off-balance when she drew herself to her full height. Her legs wobbled, and again she felt that itch at the back of her neck that made her feel exposed, vulnerable, afraid. It was better for her posture to stand tall, but in the grog of her pre-awake mindfulness she dipped her head and let her shoulders scrunch, wobbling on bent legs for the kitchen.
What about that woman? Had she been real?
It wasn't possible, she surmised, shuffling across the threshold of her living room and towards the fridge. Three steps, well-practiced, but they grated on her senses--why was her apartment so small? Her limbs felt long and gangly, like her arms might drag on the ground if she were to just bend a little more, and the thin walls and peeling paint seemed to close in on her, like she was too tall, too broad, taking up too much space.
"--this fit you a month ago, Lily, suck it in!"
"I'm trying, it hurts!"
"Well maybe if someone hadn't pigged out on those Doritos when we were on the road we wouldn't be having this issue, would we? Now suck it in, I'm not paying for another costume."
Lily banished the memories from her mind in the tedium of making breakfast, laying out a tidy array of celery, beets, spinach, carrots, and kale before dumping them all into a blender and flicking on the switch. Her eyes glossed over, watching the vegetables pulverize into pulp, her mouth wrought into a thin line.
"That dress is too short on you."
"So I can...find a longer one?"
"No, this is the dress you have to wear, but it's too short, the judges are going to think you're a whore."
Long torso, long arms, long legs, they weren't ever good for frills or curls. Lily switched off the blender and grabbed the mixer by the handle, forgoing the cup entirely as she plodded back into the living room and towards her modest bathroom. The walls here were thin, even more cramped, and she sat on the lip of her tub while she ran the water, watching idly as it chipped away at the paint on her feet.
"I don't know how we're going to make this look work, I wasn't that tall when I was your age."
"Well maybe you shouldn't have ******** a beanpole, Mom."
"LILY ANN."
There were dark thoughts touching on Lily's mind that morning, familiar twitches and aches that made her curl in on her smoothie and frown while the faucet sputtered and shook. "C'mon, Babs, this isn't you," Lily muttered to herself, wiping at one eyeliner-smeared eye. "We talked about this, we're past this."
And yet, the walls still loomed around her, too close, too tight.
Lily couldn't fight it any longer--she shrugged her shoulders in, pulled her knees up close. Maybe then she could pretend she wasn't this massive gaggle of limbs.
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Posted: Wed May 11, 2016 11:20 am
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Posted: Fri Sep 09, 2016 9:19 am
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Posted: Sun Jan 15, 2017 9:32 pm
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