You stare resolutely at the wallpaper before you, and with every fiber of your being you confirm your hatred towards it. It’s old and faded, yellowed at the edges, with flowers dotting its surface. The flowers laugh at your figure, laugh at your stare, and you feel like driving your fingernails into the paneling and dragging the paper out with your teeth.
It’s late in the evening, you can feel it through the open window, see it in the growing shadows,and you feel entirely alone. The room is desolate, save for a foldable chair you’re sitting on, right across from the offending paper. The walls are white around you, and the window yawns like a gaping hole in the living room. Outside, if you shift your eyes, you can see cars driving by and people going for walks, you can see the stars beginning to show in the sky. You can hear the rustle of the tree outside the window, and the chirp of bugs.
Again, alone. Your hair is long, longer than it’s been in a while, and you can feel sweat gathering at your neck. It already drips from your temple, runs past your eyes, and drips onto your clasped hands. All of you feels sticky, disgusting, and the Paper mocks you for it. Mocks you for the cheesy shirt Dave got you for christmas two years ago, which proudly states in loud letters “Women Want Me, Fish Fear Me”. The Paper mocks you for your unshaved legs, and the disheveled state of your hair. It mocks you for wanting to run outside, stare up at the stars, and laugh, It chides you for wanting to jump into the pool with your clothes on, and swim for hours.
So you continue to stare, and you don’t stop your silent war until the sun has completely disappeared under the horizon. By then, the dark has covered the paper, the damned flowers, the shitty incompetence of the wall before you. You get up, and your legs nearly collapse under the new weight. You stumble, lean on the chair for support, and breathe. You breathe heavy, deep breaths, and hair sticks to your forehead, and sticks in your eyes. Your hands are slick with sweat, which is finally cooling, leaving you clammy. You splash water on your face in the kitchen, you drink a glass of water, you use the bathroom. All in the dark.
Somehow, you don’t think you can stand the brightness, the harshness of artificial light. Eventually, you sit on the tile of the kitchen floor, and sip from a bottle of sparkling water. This bottles’ gone flat, and you drink it anyways. You run the tips of your hair through your hands, you haven’t showered in a week and a half, and you contemplate the implications. You also contemplate how you haven’t had the energy to cook something for yourself in 6 days, and have been living off of chips, salsa, and various boxes of takeout (some of which might have been a little too old). Your head thunks back against the cabinets, a handle digs into your shoulder, and you stare blankly up at the ceiling.
Kanaya’s only been gone for two weeks, visiting Karkat,(and Dave, you suppose) and it surprises you how codependent you seem to be. You haven’t talked to her in three days, haven’t checked your phone in three days, and you realize that in order to keep up the illusion that everything is fine and well you’re going to have to call her sometime soon.
Wait. Have to? No. You love Kanaya, you truly do. But facing her, facing anyone the longer you stay the way you are, is becoming increasingly difficult. You feel it would be easier to just… shut out things for a while. But you know that will make people worry, that will make people ask questions that you’re not sure you have the energy to fend off. So you just let out a breath that you refuse to label as a sigh, and you stand. The kitchen is dark, darker than when you sat down,and the lights from the neighbor’s houses provide no help. You stumble up the stairs, past the boxes of unpacked belongings strewn around the house; the smell of drying paint still reeks from the adjoining room.
The left bathroom drawer has a pair of scissors in it, which you regretfully have to turn the light on to find. You stare at the mirror; the mirror stares back, and you’re bathed in the fluttering light of bare bulbs tenitavely installed above you in a half-finished crap job. The marble of the sink is cool under your palms, and you look more tired than you thought you did. This past week you’ve avoided mirrors, couldn’t really stand to see your eyes staring back at you. You run your hands through your hair one more time, the length uncomfortable on your face. It reminds you of…
It reminds you of your mother. You know she spent at least an hour, every day, styling it to look the way it did. But down, and crumpled, it was as long as yours now. You see her in your face now, see the shape of her eyes, however shaded they always were, you see the set of her mouth, always pulling downwards. It’s always startling to look at Roxy and know that they are the woman you knew all those years ago. They’re jarringly different, and you love Roxy for it. But now, all you see is her, in you. And you feel maybe not as alone as you felt some hours ago, and you hate yourself for it.
You know for a fact she would love the wallpaper downstairs, as much as you think she could love anything. You know because once, in your youthful retaliation, you left an artfully placed magazine open to a page highlighting vintage architecture on the counter. The next week, she had gotten nearly everything in the image installed into the house. Including the wallpaper. It spanned an entire wall, flowery and dated. You detested it. So you learned calligraphy, (you were 8), and left a handwritten note, framed, on a desk leaned against the wall. Three weeks later, she drank herself into a stupor, and vomited all over that precious wallpaper. You had led her to the bathroom, tied her hair back with a rubber band, and listened as she threw up against the porcelain toilet. Afterwards, she had held you tight, and blubbered about how sorry she was for destroying the wallpaper. She said she loved it, and she thanked you for leaving the magazine for her.
You remember clutching your little fists tight, and squeezing your eyes against the wetness threatening to fall. A week later, she left without a note or message (she had gotten you your own gilded laptop, which you later broke) for two months, and you fed yourself and your cat off of takeout you paid for with your mother's credit card, which she had left on the top of the mantle. You had scraped your knee from falling off the chair you placed to get to it. You only realized she had come back when you heard the clinking of bottles downstairs, and discovered her mixing a concoction of almost everything in the cabinet. She spared you no more than a glance, only remarking how your shirt was off-kilter, and wrinkled.
So here you stand, and you find her in yourself, and you become terrified. Your eyes stay dry, half-lidded, and tired. You straighten your back, take the scissors, and take off a handful of hair in a quick and deadly cut. You stare at the strands in your hand, before tossing them in the trash. You begin. The scissors dance across your scalp, chopping your hair close to eventually form a messy, uneven buzzcut, as best you could get with scissors. You stare at yourself, and your eyes are wide now. You run your hand over your head, causing a flurry of hair pieces to fall to the floor and join the already impressive pile of blonde strands on the floor.
You set down the scissors. In the mirror, you’re sweating through your shirt, and theres hair all over your forehead in little pieces, so you take a shower. You don’t bother to heat the water; your mind is blank. You put on a fresh shirt, fresh shorts, and you thump your damp head against the headboard of the bed. Your head feels lighter, physically, and you don’t miss the weight. You find it’s still rather difficult to get up and actually do things though. Huh.
You run your hand over your head again, and you reach over to your phone, where it’s rested on the bedside table for the past few days. You find Kanaya messaged you yesterday, Dave messaged you a few hours ago, and so did Jade. You answer them, one at a time, and Jade is active, so you chat with her about a plant she found on a hike, and how she accidentally got caught up chasing down a rabbit, (which got away), and ended up lost in the woods for a couple of days. Apparently she survived just fine, and thought it was all very exciting. You smile as you talk to her. When you sign off, it’s 2am. You chug the bottle of sparkling water you have on the bedside table, get up, and grab the tools lying in the hallway.
====================
Three hours later, you scrape the last bit of wallpaper off the wall. It falls in a sad little dance down the wall, all the long way to the floor. You’re floating a good way off the ground, and you lower yourself down. You collect the shavings into a heap, and decide to burn them the next day. You find you’re startlingly hungry, so you make pancakes. Simple, easy. The pancakes are good, you learned to cook a few months after moving to Earth C.
You feel alone. You look out the window, and it’s completely dark. The pancakes, you realize, could have used some more vanilla extract. You take a deep breath, and exhale fully. You walk out on the front porch, and you feel the heat like a blanket around you. You look up, and you see the stars high above. You feel the warmth of the pavement under your skin, and the little breezes as they whip the trees, flutter the sleeves of your shirt. It smells like summer, you’ve come to realize, it smells like warmth and sweat and heat. It smells like something new. The new house, that you and Kanaya bought together, the new sensation of Setting Things Up Again, unpacking little things you thought you’d forgotten. Now, you’re alone. But you remember the echo of Kanaya’s voice in the hall as she called to you, you remember the call of your friend’s voices as they explored you new house, you remember them all coming to help paint, and how Dirk had gotten half his shirt stained white because of one of Jane’s antics, and how Roxy had laughed so hard they cried. So you feel alone, but perhaps not quite.
No, not quite. On the kitchen table, you hear your phone ring, and you go to answer it.
The lights in the kitchen feel just as warm as the heat does outside in the dark, and you think you find that poetic. Just a bit.