Clementine had become a wild child. Born in America but raised abroad, she now had little regard for the expectations of high society. But her reckless ways eventually catch up with her when she is kicked out of college in New York City and forced t...
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She tired desperately to piece everything together, but all there was left to do now was wait.
Wait in agonizing agony. Sometimes she felt she was going to throw up, sometimes she couldn't move too much. Other times, she felt more manic, trying to do something, anything, to keep her mind moving and not linger on any one fact for too long.
She paced her room, trying to organize things. Clean up her jewelry drawer. Clean up her make up drawer. In a moment of desperation, she even denied to clean up all the stray documents and papers and journals in her desk drawer. Taking everything and dumping it on the floor, an envelop slid a few paces away from her and it caught her eye.
She picked it up, and slowly pulled out the piece of paper inside it but stopped halfway when she realized what it was. There it was again, the disturbing, unstable feeling that her world was falling apart all over again.
It was the ticket. The plane ticket to New York that her father gave her only a few days ago, and that she absentmindedly threw in her desk drawer, not thinking twice about it.
It was only made worse now, that things were the way they were. She was starting to doubt everything anyone ever told her. If he gave this to her, did he know this was going to happen. He must have known it was going to be big to go to these lengths.
And Zico...Zico, Zico, Zico.
His name flashed in her mind, replaying like a broken record. How dare he keep something like this away form her. He practically went off, attempting to single handedly take down her family....for her?
He asked her to move in, but he didn't' tell her about this? Maybe he thought hit would all work out. Maybe he thought he would get away with this too, that his lucky streak would take him this far. But every lucky streak ends.
She pulled out the ticket again and looked at it. The flight was in 48 hours. She did't even want to think about having to think about that, but somewhere deep inside her, she knew that this may be her only option if things were to turn bad.
She put the ticket back in the envelope and pretended to forget about it.
She rummaged through whatever else was in the pile on her floor.
Old receipts form restaurants, cares, shops. Doodles on cocktail napkins from a bar outing she took with Mina. Some polaroids. She was shocked she didn't have any pictures of Zico. She realized she was so enveloped in him, that she never even bothered trying to capture it for a memory. Never thinking she'd have to either because things were going so well or so bad. And now it all disappeared like it was a dream, a figment of her imagination.
She didn't even think about going through their text messages on her phone. That would break her, for sure. The weight of it all. How everything, changed, developed, and sank into quicksand seemingly.
She also found a journal. Even though she hadn't written in it recently, forgetting what was even in it, she flipped through it. Going through all these old memories strangely felt like ripping a band aid off. Painfully. Slowly.
She didn't know where it was going to all go form here. Zico convinced her only recently, only yesterday, that it was all going to be fine. But deep inside he must have had an inkling too.
Flipping through the pages, there were lots of blank spots. Diary entries with months in between. Before New York, then New York itself with was like a fever dream where she gave up on trying to commemorate any of her experiences at all. And then she froze, there it was, pages and pages that she wrote in the beginning.
She must have written 20 pages, handwritten, about the very first time they met. When it felt she was set on a new course.
She started reading it, slowly -
<< The plaza was full. It was so nice to abandon myself, even if for a night,...then I saw him.>>
She stopped. She couldn't't do it, at least not yet and not like this.
Closing the books, and giving up on trying to organize the mess, she threw everything back in the desk drawer, lingering a moment over the red envelope. Her life, a series of decisions, life altering moments, hidden in envelopes. The letter from Columbia..the ticket. All this back and forth was making her head spin.
She walked over to the window, cracking it open, and lighting a cigarette from her emergency pack. It's been so long, she thought, blowing smoke into her reflection in the window.
