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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06 | six
THERE HAD TO BE SOME FORM OF curse that operated in a strict sight of strange and cruel humor which the world had bestowed upon Aurora. It morphed her everyday life into extremes for a period of time, then let it settle back into a torturous routine for another. Her head lost its pause button and suddenly she was doused in boiling water before being dragged into icy calm depths where nothing existed and she was the only moving thing in the impossible stillness. Only that and nothing else in between.
A week had passed since the early morning stargazing with James on the rooftop, and she hadn't caught a glimpse of him since. His presence had disappeared from the walls in a way that mist lifted from treetops, the halls quiet and deathly static. Aurora couldn't fathom of the next time she would see him again and yet his eyes were still permanently engrained in the darkness behind her eyelids. She found herself stepping up the stairs to the highest floor alone every night, sleep still being an illusive creature that refused to see her. The young psychiatrist could have downed the sleeping pills that she had replenished in the medicine cabinet, but somehow the thought of the bottle made her stomach churn and throat tighten, so they remained untouched on the second shelf behind the mirror. Aurora's medicine came in the form of leaning on the edge of the quiet rooftop alone, and looking everywhere and hearing everything. Her head remained a spiral and the stillness was still ever-present. It was like that for seven days.
And it was always silent, as if the atmosphere had liquified.
However last night, Aurora accidentally cut herself on the card stock of the file. And it suddenly got too loud. She had been reading the endless sea of words every night before slipping away from her apartment, and that particular night was the one where her thumb had misjudged the toughness of the material and received a small gash that wouldn't stop bleeding. So Aurora ended up being cooped in the cramped bathroom for twenty minutes, going through tissues like liquor bottles and jumping from one terrible thought to another. She felt her pulse in her throat as she applied pressure to the open cut, willing, praying for it to stop bleeding. Long moments passed and she sat on the edge of the bathtub. When the red finally did ease and the paper no longer ran crimson, she applied way too much rubbing-alcohol on the torn skin and carefully put on a Band-Aid with numb fingertips.
A dull buzz rang from the single light bulb in the bathroom, and she stared at her reflection in the dim lighting. Somehow Aurora always managed to come face-to-face with the pane of glass during the worst of nights. And the person looking back at her was always the same figure who needed a method of normalcy. She needed peace. Aurora Eden needed sleep.
The throbbing pain of the cut had made everything far too real, and her thoughts far too uncontrolled. Everything came in the form of spiked blood pressure and inability to escape the possible outcomes of her current circumstance. Her head sped like a freight train that had lost its breaks.
