Under the Umbrella ✓

-03-

Sandra didn't answer the call and it wasn't very often she missed a call from Aria. She glanced at the time from her phone only to immediately realize that Sandra was still at her university and she was only getting off after an hour. She tended to forget about it very often. Unlike Aria, Sandra studied full-time, which meant she had school almost every day.

Aria had just passed by Sandra's campus to get to the café nearby, which Sandra herself had recently found out about. Coffee Break became the perfect place of meet up between them whenever time permitted because of its convenient location and its inviting atmosphere that there were times Aria would drop by for a drink by herself after a long day of work. She wasn't sure if Sandra would call her back but she decided to take a leap of faith and wait for her at the café instead of going back now.

There wasn't much to do even if she went back home other than studying for an upcoming exam. She had an angry mother waiting for her back at home and she wasn't in the mood to deal with her at the moment. It was one of those few days where she didn't have to go to work or go to school and she wanted to lighten up by seeing the only sunshine in her life named Sandra.

Aria had lost contact with every friend she made in high school. She remembered how they promised to visit each other every now and then, some making cute plans of attending the same university, and how they swore to keep in touch. The here and now was that everyone was scattered within the country and around the world and everyone was occupied in their own adulthood to summon up promises made when they were teens.

Sandra was the only exception. She had always been the exception to Aria. Sandra was the sole reason why she hadn't lost her sanity over the years. She was the only one to have known everything happening in her life and the only one she was able to freely and frankly speak her mind to. Their friendship had kicked off from middle school and to her own surprise, they were still going strong, strong enough to stick to the vow of living in the same city ten years later.

Even though she was going to be meeting Sandra, she was never going to tell her how her mother raised havoc today. She would never lie to Sandra but keeping certain things under wraps didn't count as a lie – or that was how she justified herself. It wasn't that Sandra didn't know about her mother being sick. She was so close to Sandra's family that even they knew about the situation and her family's history. Aria just never liked to speak about the encounters in detail. Just because it was known by the walls, it didn't mean getting through the walls was any less embarrassing. She felt more at ease with pretending like everything was at bay rather than making Sandra feel helpless by overlaying the events that was just an everyday to her.