Overlap

Eponine

🌟2019🌨️

Why does it take, till the eleventh hour, for us to make the simplest of calls...

Newcastle was all lit up. Lit up and twinkling despite the rain and the northeastern winds that tore through the city on slate grey afternoons like this one. It was one of those days where the clouds had rolled in and covered the sun without giving it a chance to rise, so the storm that was brewing on the horizon, the thunder clouds overhead, left 3.15 feeling like the witching hour. But the road into toon from Shields was lit up, sparkling, warm blinking glow in spite of the weather, and it would remain that way for the rest of December.

Rather than decide, this all in a night, I'm good to follow your lead, take as long as you need...

Raindrops pitter pattered on my windscreen, they refracted the greens and the blues, the pinky hues of christmas lights from the windows of the houses on the main road. I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel as my brothers guitar kicked in and when I looked to my left, picked out the worst and the best of the pedestrians, watched the school kids walking home, getting soaked without their coats on, the geordie way, I felt my loneliness creeping up on me again.

The roads were busy this time of day, the schools all closed, the mothers gathered, the teenagers stumbled from the pavement into one another, tripping eachother up. Lasses in skirts rolled up at the waistline, lads choking on their cigarettes trying to impress the lasses, who were giggling at them, still blushing, lashes fluttering all the same.

They reminded me of school, when I'd stumbled home in the evening just like they were now. School cardi heavy with rain as me and Laura trailed behind her brother and his mates.

The school gates which were swarming now were the same school gates I'd fled with Niall when we were just two kids, not even in love, running away despite having not done much wrong at all. Only really running away for the laughs.

I caught my smile flickering in the mirror, orange and red headlights washing over my skin, putting some colour in my cheeks.

Christmas always made me nostalgic, December was a killer month.

All the family calls, all the friends who want to know if they're going to see you the last Friday before Christmas, down the pub you've all been meeting since you were 16.

Laura had called earlier to invite me out with her and her new boyfriend for drinks later that evening, she'd told me to bring Sam, but Sam wasnt back from tour till next week so I'd shaken my head and told her to stop pity inviting me on her dates. She'd laughed and I'd pretended to be joking but I wasn't really joking at all.

I wasn't daft, I knew I looked pretty lonely from the outside.

I knew that when I wasn't with Niall, when Andy was only hovering around me half-heartedly, when my brother went off on tour and when Sam ducked into the studio in London for two weeks at a time. When I used the empty house as an excuse to take live in shifts at the kids home, instead of using it to put time into all the others things Id said I was going to, it looked as if I lead a very lonely life.

It looked like I needed rescuing but I didn't.

I wasn't as lonely as I seemed. I wasn't as hopeless as my best friend sometimes imagined when she looked at me over a Costa coffee takeaway cup with those sympathetic eyes.

And I've found, that we end up laughing and its sound, and eventually...

I sang along under my breath, muttering to myself a little frustrated as the traffic lights changed to red once more and I was left, for the third time, on the wrong side of the crossroads.