Under the Umbrella ✓

-01-

Some days, smiling was all she could do to forget her reality, and then there were those days when it became too tiring to smile, reality too overpowering to be forgotten as if reality itself didn't want to disappear amongst all other things.

Today was one of those days; those days when reality tested how long her boundaries lasted.

Props to reality really – it chose one of the worst days to test her. It was scorching hot, humid, and suffocating. There was sweat running down her back and her morning skincare routine running down her face, but she was too busy to complain.

Or rather register it.

All she could hear was the series of honks and people roaring out of their windows as if they were caged inside their cars. She was losing her levelheadedness from the panic and anxiousness but she managed to focus on the matter at hand. Not as if focusing on the matter helped much either; her mother just wouldn't step out of the cab and the cab driver wasn't too pleased with her trying to take his customer away.

"Could you please just come out? Please," Aria beseeched. Her mother wasn't even listening to her, too determined in trying to close the door.

"Hurry up, young lady! I have places to be," the cab driver shouted, watching his rearview mirror in dread. "Do you see the traffic you're causing right now?"

Fuck this, she thought. Aria was using force and though she was pretty short compared to women her age, there was no doubt she was much stronger than her mother's frail frame. She grabbed her mother by the arm, hauled her out of the car, and shut the taxi door all at the same time.

The taxi driver whizzed past them in nanoseconds without any hesitation as she dragged her screaming mother in the direction of the sidewalk. She was never good with crossing roads and just seeing the cars that were speeding by both her sides was only making her falter. Half her attention was on her mother who was trying to escape her hold and the other half was on the blaring beeps of the cars whenever they tried to cross the road. She was petrified, for herself, for her mother, for what they had become at this point in their lives.

It took her a while, and only because her heartbeats seemed to be much louder than the horns that it actually calmed her down, but she was ultimately able to cross the road.

The moment they safely arrived on the sidewalk, she was met with the unexpected. Her mother's slap on her left cheek had her ears ringing and eyes watering. She bit her lips, restraining herself with all her might to keep herself from doing something she would regret. She wished she could let her mother go. She wished she could just stop trying to fix her family when they were way past broken. Dead was what they really were, but something in the residue of their aggressive souls kept going. Life was nothing but a battlefield to them; they seemed to fight against it every day rather than trying to make peace with it.

And at the end of it, Aria wished she could let it all go.

But she couldn't.

"Let's get back home," Aria muttered through her gritted teeth as she tried to bind her hand around her mother's arm.

She should have known her mother wasn't going to go easy on her after what she had done. She should have anticipated the worst, but she didn't prepare for it. Thus, when her mother seized her by the hair in a vice-like grip, she could only yelp out in pain.

"How dare you treat me like this?" her mother shrieked. "Is this how you pay me back for raising you?! You should have died! I should have poisoned you! I will..."

Aria was aware of her mother still firing all sorts of curses but she was more mindful of the looks thrown their way from every close by walker on the street. Tears filled her eyes, not because she couldn't stop her mother's bony fingers from nearly wrenching a handful of strands from her scalp, but because she was utterly embarrassed. She had managed to seize her mother's hands and she should have felt secure and dominant with her reliable strength in counter to her mother's but instead, she felt detained in the vines of their ruined relationship.

Neither her mother nor she ever won against each other, not when they kept losing to life and certainly not when they had disposed themselves of their sanity.