𝐦𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐧𝐞. | "oh, how you ache for gentle hands and the smooth waves of calming voices. i am no messiah of these things but perhaps my warmth will be the soothing medicine you have yearned for in the illusions of familiar faces."
一 in which...
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03 | three
AT FIRST, SHE WASN'T AWARE OF THE figure that had glid up the stairs behind her. There were things that were racing inside her head at one hundred miles an hour and Aurora was scarcely observant of the familiar environment that surrounded her. But when she took one large gulp of air and forced herself to focus her vision on the actual, palpable realities in front of her, she realized that someone else was climbing up the stairwell just a flight below.
So she used that as her anchor to the atmosphere around her. As her feet carried her step by step, up the long flights of stairs, she shut out the white noise inside her head and listened to the steady footsteps of the stranger beneath her. They were slow and steady, a rhythmic metronome that helped her grasp on to something concrete. It acted as the only element that bridged her between reality on her own two feet and the ever-tightening spiral that always plagued her thoughts.
Strange, how the simplest of elements could rein her raging mind into temporary submission.
But as she approached her floor, she suddenly realized that the steady chain that connected her to something real was disappearing. Aurora continued to climb the concrete and she listened to the footsteps slow, gently evaporate, and finally come to a stop. She let out a sigh and felt her clammy fingers tighten around the material of the manila file.
The dull throb of her temples pulsed with the drumming of her heart in her ribcage and she felt a frustration trickling through her veins as the last flight of stairs loomed before her. Aurora wondered how she could be so faulty for someone who worked every day to fix people.
Finally, after seemingly a century of climbing up small ledges, she arrived at her floor. She had tunnel vision and was only focused on the door of her apartment, determined to get inside as quickly as possible and gulp down two tablets of painkillers. The papers in her grasp were also awfully intriguing and the world around her settled down to a mute. She wasn't aware of anything around her, just the doorknob and the battered hinges of the closed entrance.
She gripped the file loosely in her left hand as she stopped in front of the door and tugged her bag from her shoulder to search for her keys. They were normally located in a side pocket just on the inside of the pouch, but today she had tossed them in carelessly in an effort to shorten the time to get home. And now, she regretted it.
Aurora's hands searched through the crevices of her bag and sifted through the belongings. Before her impatience got to the better of her, she reached in blindly and attempted to locate the metal blindly. But as she came up empty-handed each time, her head dropped to peer into the fabric, and her hold on the manila file gave way. The papers spilled onto the floor of the hallway in a flutter of sounds and she cursed under her breath. Of course--as all cliches went-- a millisecond after the object had dropped, her fingertips came in contact with the coolness of her keys. She let out a puff of air and readjusted her bag to rest securely on her shoulder before she shut her eyes for a moment to try and calm herself.
