Tasted Kinda Lonely - [Ursula/Percy]

Waking up was peaceful, once.

In the mornings, the world was calm, and that was the best time to wake. From my bedroom I could catch the moon fading in dawn, so that when the Sun summoned the rest of a sleepy District to rise, I could take comfort in knowing I had seen the last dying rays of the night moon, and that even when dwarfed, it was real. Strong. Resilient. Would rise again at dusk.

Dawn – a time of day to live for.

Yet days grind and blur, weaving together in streams of subconscious living as variegated as the potent concoctions thrumming irregularities beneath my lucid veins. Tracing patterns of rivers – I count the colours beneath the sea of white, dreading the day red outweighs blue and I’m drowning in blood, no longer water. Up becomes down as light becomes day and you’re breathing through heaving lungs with last night’s tragedies stained across salty lips, stumbling from a strange broken bed in a strange broken house with a stranger slowly dying in the room next door. Eyes alert and craving something at 4:52 in the afternoon.

Walk, soft footfalls that won’t wake the soul of a girl I scoop into my arms and hug so tightly I can feel her lipid heartbeat beside my own even when it is 4:52 in the afternoon.

Leave, through the back door. You stopped using the front door the day you ran away for the first time.

Walk, again, with rushed strides and shoved shoulders in the street. Searching eyes, stinging, more water falling. Bruises and fresh scars don’t hurt like those faded once did, but they make the damned feel alive and you’re gone, again, buried beneath your own fatigue from the search for a way out. A way to soothe burdens, eliminate fears, one at a time.

Enter, through a front door that creaks and shudders, yet nobody stops to look. Nobody cares.

Swallow, red liquid gone, dispel the salt from your body.

Lonely souls of broken hearts, broken minds, broken spirits, come to mourn in a respite – basking in the orange glow of artificial lighting and mediocre ambience.

Swallow, amber liquid gone, dispel the salt from your body.

Winter brings night time quicker than the warm season – (what was it called again? Spring? Summer?) – and there’s a crack in the moth-bitten curtain beside the only window in this bar that lets a single ray of moonlight break free from the draped restraints. Not long enough.

Caught, again, embedded between brittle strands of white hair, void of all lustre albeit the gleam the full moon

‘She had sisters, you know.’

Eyes focus. A man, short. I don’t know him. How long has he been there. Standing. Watching. Waiting. Another gulp, dispel the salt from your body.

‘Ursula Libertine.’

A name carried along the wind, passed from mouth to ear and back again. Glazed eyes, nails bitten to the quick, shaking hands that quiver in a way I pretend not to see (just like hers, they’re hers, hers, I was there only five minutes ago, five minutes was all, hers, I’m coming soon) clutching a glass, clutching at straws, making sense of a mind no longer streaming like clockwork.

‘She had sisters, you know.’

Swallow, clear liquid gone, dispel the salt from her body.

Had.

A small cough, a choke. She's broken, too, in a palace of broken things.

I had have a sister, too.

Walking, uncertain.

Sitting, uncertain.

Speaking, uncertain.

‘Ursula, let’s make a deal.’

My arm itches.

There’s a patch of red splotched against that blinding wall of insipidity, a cool stinging sensation to accompany the blossoming pigments navigating through threadbare hairs on my right forearm. I don’t know why I notice it, sitting in this strange bar with a girl insisting on disagreement, (‘no, no, no, no.’) Not when there are a thousand other hurts in the world that I haven’t even began to scratch the surface of.

Scratch, chipped nails grazing skin in jagged rakes. Scratch, scratch.

This happens, often. Losing my mind and picking at scabs, as if the scars they leave will form some higher power in the constellations they trace. Power. They told me power was dangerous. Before they left, they left us, what do they know about power when they left like thieves in the night? Absent-minded, subconscious pain; the aftermath of drunken decisions. Causes, unknown, yet constant.

(I think it’s when I’m losing.)

‘Check back in about never.’

But never’s too long.

Her breaths come and go in shudders, separated by short, unamused laughs. The telltale smile lingering on her face is sad – it does not quite reach her eyes, and it’s sickening to see a soul so dead because it reminds me exactly of her.

Blink, I should have turned away.

Turn, she turns away, lopsided and dizzy atop a barstool with legs as brittle as her own. In another world, she could be a queen. I can almost see reality blurring, worlds warping, the spirit of a girl in a former life visible once more. Now, she’s just a shell.

We’re both shells.

Down, another shot glass, another drink stowed away. More stares, more snickers – are they aimed at me or her? – and her ignorance is blindingly painful as my arms reach out to grasp shoulders and turn her back to me I’m a bad guy.

Shaking, my hands shake.

Crashing, glass scatters across the ground as diamonds slip through her fingers.

Silence, I hear silence but I’m also blind, rage or desperation, I don’t know, and so maybe there are sounds just as certain as there are sights and maybe I’m a deaf man for a few short moments, but I’m not a dead one yet.

Millimetres, a fractional measurement of the tiny distance between our faces.

I don’t know who pulls away first.

It takes a few long breaths to steady the nerve-endings that remain buzzed from the hours already wasted in this mildewed hellhole. High, on energy, on liquor, on sad faces and glazed eyes and low-pulled ponytails.

Shaking, my hands no longer shake.

Silence, I don’t speak. Neither does she.

I take a freshly poured glass and mimic Ursula’s own actions. Disapproval from a shadowed bartender, but he’s seen enough heartache and despair to last twenty lifetimes. He doesn't care.

He stopped caring the day he sat on our side of the bar.

Scratch. It's a habit. Red, spreading like wildfire. Tongued flames licking at my wrist. Reminders of patches on my mind, pockets of emotions and buried secrets shrouded beneath amethyst oceans.

It makes me wonder what hers are.

‘My name’s Percy–’ eyes, focussed, I’m a good guy, ‘–and I’m not leaving without a deal.’