O n e

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Manon Lévesque had grown accustomed to living in France and following the same daily routine. It had been her dream to leave England and move to France ever since she could remember her summer vacations in the mansion, but she had wished she'd live there under better circumstances. She wasn't living in France because she chose to, she was living there because life threw her there, and nothing more.

After that faithful summer, everything went on as it usually did. Teenage Manon hated going back to England, where her parents resided and her school was located, but adult Manon knew that if she had the chance, she'd travel back in time in a heartbeat just to experience life before it turned on her.

Manon went back to school shortly after she arrived in England, but a few weeks later, her grandfather got an unexpected heart attack and passed away. Manon wasn't there when it happened, but her grandmother's face upon hearing the news was enough to make that memory the worst one she ever had. Her grandmother suffered from complications of her own and lost her ability to walk due to the trauma of her husband passing. She insisted on staying in a nursing home in France, just so she could be as close as possible to her husband's resting place.

Manon wanted to be close to her grandmother, so she convinced her parents to let her move to France and finish her studies there. It took some time, effort, and many tears until they agreed, but once they did, she finally escaped her home and found herself visiting her grandmother in the nursing home ever since.

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Waking up could be really cruel, especially if Manon's dreams were better than reality. The most despairing part of it was, though, that eventually, even the memory of her dreams would fade. Then, the once considered to be a rebel, would be left with the lonely feeling of detachment, overtaken by dissociation, left to wander in the hollow abyss that was her emotions, the only proof that she ever had a pleasant dream, to begin with.

Manon's eyes slowly opened, her eyelashes faintly batting against her lids when she blinked. She laid on her bed, debating whether or not she should get up. She always did, in the end, but getting up was never easy for her. Her body felt weak, just like her energy had been for years since that faithful farewell.

Manon would stumble around her cluttered apartment in the mornings, the apartment that held all of who she was amidst the bleak walls and scattered marks. A watering can would be grasped tightly in her hand, and as she'd water her plants, she'd speak to them as if though they were her closest of friends, her only confidants. She'd sometimes ask for their opinions, listening carefully, and then answering as if they had given her a considered reply that could make all the difference.

The girl knew she was lonely, there was no denying that. At first, it hurt, shutting herself out from everyone she knew, but over time she learned how to lessen the pain, how to simply, exist, without giving much thought to the rest.

She would find herself each morning, sitting in the same cafe. That cafe was her safe haven. In that cafe, she felt she was still apart of society. She knew that if her grandmother was in her senses, she'd tell her to go out there and live her life, but Manon had refused to leave her grandmother alone, so she sat in that cafe each day before her visit and among the noises of people, their scent, their occasional glances and the chatter of the baristas, she gave her brain the socialization it craved so well, just enough to make it through the day.

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