Double-Sided Letters

Empty Words and Emptier Hearts: SIDE A

I feel so empty

abundance of nothingness

is all that's inside

- You're not hollow, Catherine.

On the day she received this, the sky was blue paint— that is, to say, dolloped in thick streaks of color across the horizon, dripping soft rain and rolls of fog the consistency of pudding.

She hadn't had pudding in a while, actually. She closed her eyes and attempted to remember the creamy texture of chocolate pudding. It had been in a cake the first time she'd had it, and she'd been so delighted at its gelatinous wiggling. She used to like slicing them into clean cuts of brown, then dicing them into tiny cubes...

She muttered a curse.

Stupid. That's Jello, not pudding.

As far as she was concerned, there wasn't anything more depressing than being unable to recall the flavor of pudding. Catherine sighed and mentally sifted this into the forgotten pile, along with various other desserts and some old sports.

Catherine had been at the window for a better view of the sky's canvas upon reading her next letter, but had apparently wandered idly to the kitchen, for she was greeted ceremoniously with a series of bangs and another "Goddammit Jeremy, I never should've left school for you!" She decided this was less-than-perfect timing and ducked back under ceiling to disappear into her mouse hole of a room. (It would fit a mouse much better than her, to tell the truth).

She soon had the astonishing revelation that standing on the staircase landing was not going to make the letters come to her (amazing!), so she sat herself back down on her bed and studied the newest note.

She'd taken to reading them in 'order', order meaning by whichever one she picked up first. Strangely enough, this seemed to work, and they had continued to flow chronologically. To an extent.

Catherine lay down and slipped just a bit over the side of the bed, letting her head hang upside-down and her feet remain planted firmly on the floor (it was a very thin bed). She held the newest letter in front of her. She'd read it many times over already, yet she couldn't seem to get it out of her head.

She'd felt hollow so many times before, like someone'd taken a knife to her chest and made a neat little incision, removing her heart and her compassion with it. Like at the funeral, so many months ago...

She blinked and shook her head, as if trying to refuse the tears. The time was now, and therefore all other times were meaningless. Her memories were corpses. Corpses of things that happened but were gone. Gone. She took comfort in this familiar phrase and wiped her eyes clean.

The hollowness had alarmed her at first. She'd panicked, pounding on her chest like she was trying to free something, anything, before it fizzled out completely. But over time she'd begun to accept its emptiness, leading to a downward spiral of little black holes that filled her stomach and spotted her heart. She guessed that one day she eventually gave up on love. Loving people was much too difficult for it to be even worth anything.

But that little thing had bounced back, and made her love Ora and her mother and even Calum, just a bit. For someone to tell her that she still had something beating in the recesses of her speckled body was like trying to believe she could fly. She felt the wings fluttering on her back, sure, but looking down from the warm little nest at the vast green below, so far and painfully fast, she doubted that those tiny propellers on her could keep her up in the air for long before she'd plummet down into despair.

But somehow, when Elaine said it, Catherine believed it. Elaine, she'd learned, was not one to lie.

Selena, on the other hand...