Some days, Rory would wake up feeling invincible, like she could fight everything and everyone that came her way.
Some others, all she wanted to do was stay in bed and ignore the world, the tiredness inside her mind feeling like too much to handle.
Then there were the days that were neutral, when she felt nothing great and yet not so terrible either.
Today was one of those days. Rory had woken up and had her neutral breakfast, then she took a shower and dressed a neutral outfit and put on a neutral make-up before going on with her neutral day.
It had been an overall dull day, the most exciting part of it being the new Hawaiian resto she had found that sold cheap Poke bowls. The rest had been business as usual — until it was not.
The promise of a bad day lured in like a storm on a sunny day, washing away all the dullness and turning it into anguish with the blink of an eye — or rather, the buzz of a phone.
Rory was sitting inside her car waiting for her flatmates when her phone lighted up with a new notification. At first she thought it was Madison texting to say she would be late – like always – but one glance down told her that she was completely wrong.
What was coming was her own personal storm in form of an email.
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She didn't have to scroll down to know what was coming next.
There was probably some paragraph saying how they appreciated her for taking her time to apply for the position and then another one where they — oh so kindly — encouraged her to apply for future openings. Or anything along those lines.
That wasn't her first rejection letter — hell, that summer alone she had received at least five of them, not to count the ones that had been piling up for the last couple of years — and it certainly wouldn't be her last, but that didn't make it any less upsetting.
It didn't matter how many times it happened, rejection always had a way of making her feel bad. It had something to do with hope. Hope that this time it would finally be different, that she would finally hit the jackpot, that this wouldn't be yet another turn down.
But it never was.
And just like every time, she felt a pang in her heart, a swirl of emotions overwhelming her — from disappointment to sadness and then all the way to frustration — and her eyes stung with the imminent threat of tears.
She bit her lip, trying to stop the tears from falling, the image of the girl crying inside a car just didn't suit her.
Rory wasn't usually a crier — she actually thought herself to be quite an emotionally stable person — but failure always had a way of messing with her emotions. She'd been raised to be an overachiever, after all.
