All Things Nice » Band of Brothers

90: Familiar

"Do you think you want to try going out again?"

"I think I want to stay inside forever."

John sighed and ran a tired hand down his face. He was getting frustrated with her, Posey could tell, but she was unwilling to do anything to rectify it. She wouldn't be going outside again, not for a long while yet, regardless of how exasperated it made her brother. Really, she thought he, of all people, should understand what it was like to be struggling with a difficult past.

"Posey -" he started.

She cut him off briskly, losing patience herself. "I'm not going out, John. You can't make me."

"It's not healthy to be staying inside all the time," he argued, crossing his arms.

Posey stood up from the back doorstep and turned to level him with a scowl.

"It's not right, Posey," John went on, unbothered by her glare. "It's not normal."

"Neither is what happened to me!" she exclaimed, her hands fisting at her skirt. "Just let me deal with it in my own way."

"How long has it been now since the war ended?"

Posey looked away.

"Eleven months," he answered the question for her. "You've been out of it for even longer than that. At some point you've got to start living your life again, Posey, or it'll race away from you so fast you'll miss it."

"That's easy for you to say when you've had more time to deal with everything than I have," Posey protested, and promptly turned and sat back down. She set her eyes on a little lone magpie on the back fence, hopping around in the morning sunlight and thoroughly undisturbed by the rest of the world.

"Well, how long is it going to take?" John demanded from behind her, refusing to relent.

"As long as it takes," she replied, resting her chin in her hand and her elbow on her knee. "I'll be ready when I'm ready and not a moment before."

Posey seemed to be getting nagged from all sides; John, Mrs. Daniels, and Gene were all constantly on at her to go out and make friends and get a job and whatever else. The more they demanded things of her the more she retreated into herself, barely speaking to John and Mrs. Daniels when she saw them and taking longer to reply to Gene's letters.

Deep down, she knew she was making a state of herself. She knew all of it was a bad idea. But she just couldn't seem to help herself, and the more that people told her to stop, the more stubborn she became on the matter. For as long as she could remember she'd feared loneliness and isolation, and now she had people begging her to let them in and all she could do was push them away. She was rejecting her existence in any way she knew how and it frightened her equally as much as it comforted her. It was just so easy to be alone.

But whilst it was easy to be alone, it wasn't easy to be lonely. Posey always felt the weight of her loneliness the heaviest in the mornings, when John would be out at work and Mrs. Daniels would be out visiting friends. Everyday Posey would sit in the garden on that little back doorstep she'd claimed as her favourite seat in the house and stare out at the empty garden, as though waiting for someone to appear out from behind that one lonely tree and offer her the solution to all of her problems.

Posey chewed on her bottom lip and set aside the cup of tea she'd been sipping from, the liquid having gone cold now that she'd been nursing it for so long. It was warmer today than it had been recently - the April weather was finally starting to act like summer was nearing - and she closed her eyes into the sunlight to soak up the feeling of it on her skin.