Blank Canvas
Author: Pharo
Disclaimer: 'Alias' belongs to ABC, Bad Robot, and JJ Abrams.
Summary: He's not sure that his world exists anymore.
Spoilers: "The Telling."
Feedback: pharo@newyork.com
'please speak slowly, my heart is learning, teach me heart-ache, stop this burning now…'
– All-American Rejects, 'Too Far Gone'He is greeted with an overflowing mailbox, packed with a week's worth of bills that he doesn't want to address and fantasy vacations that he can't go on. The elevator is broken (some things never change) so he walks up the stairs to his fourth floor apartment.
On the trek up, he finds a teenage couple kissing on the third floor.
"Get a room," he mutters, loud enough for the couple to shoot glares at him.
He is surprised to hear the bitterness in his voice, but what scares him even more is the anger that courses through his body at the sight of people who are happy and in love. He hates the unfairness of it all – to have both things at once without having to make a sacrifice – and wonders why he couldn't be born under a lucky star.
The carpeting in his apartment fills the horizontal slice space between the bottom of his door and the beginning of the floor. It takes him a minute to figure out which key to insert in the hole, but after two tries, the process of elimination dictates that the longest key is the correct choice. He pushes his shoulder to the door to open a crack that is big enough for him and all his mail to step through.
He is surprised to see his living room this messy. His olive-green carpet is littered with crumpled pieces of lined paper, newspaper clippings, and outdated issues of various magazines. He makes his way passed the assorted junk to find his oak desk cluttered ticket stubs and writing utensils. There are reminders to buy milk and fruits on the refrigerator and numbers without names attached to the answering machine. There are post-its all over his house (in various colors) with irrelevant information and extremely short shorthand messages to himself.
He plucks a reminder off his wall.
rmbr ab bd prs 5/29
He can still make out the message: remember Abby's birthday present (March 29th). He looks around the room one more time and is satisfied to find the disorder. Despite everything that has happened, he is still a writer, scribbling random thoughts on square pieces of yellow paper at 2 am and spilling eloquent prose on legal pads under the pressure of a deadline.
He walks into his bathroom and is unnerved by what he sees. He doesn't have the slightest idea who the reflection in the mirror represents anymore. He spends ten minutes just staring into the speculum that dangles above his sink.
He seems older now, his eyes weary from nights that are haunted by the memory of fluorescent lights and a constant barrage of questions. He wants to know if the person he's become is real. His hands pass over the scar on his forehead, the miniscule bursts of pain verifying the authenticity of his counterpart in the smeared glass.
He closes his eyes to think of her 'happy place' – an idea Francie developed on a drunken Friday night that stuck with them long after the booze wore off. He tries to imagine a sandy beach – white sand, not the desert-kind that fill his shoes when he goes to the beach – and palm trees that provide shade to straw huts.
He inhales slowly and squeezes his eyes shut, harder now because he doesn't see anything before him. He feels the soft trickle of a teardrop down his face.
He realizes now that he isn't the same person that lived in this apartment. He certainly isn't an award-winning journalist – he doubts if he could write an intriguing personal ad at this point. He isn't the guy that found inspiration in the frozen foods aisle or interpreted hidden messages in teen flicks with his best friends on Friday nights. He's not sure that his world exists anymore.
"Why isn't this working?" he asks in desperation, calling out to his likeness for a happy place – any place that isn't where he is at the moment.
He waits for an answer in ridiculous anticipation until the overwhelming silence seems to suffocate him. Silence seems to take on a tangible form, clinging to his body like morning dew and pulling at him like gravity. He sinks down until his burning palms are flat against the cool tiles.
He closes his eyes again and sees her slumped against a ceramic tub, the horrible shade of red clashing against the stark white. He wishes that he hadn't called the agency and asked for the truth – clean shot to the head – because now he can't stop thinking about it.
He hopes that it was quick and she was gone before the pain even registered. He wishes he could've been there to stop it from happening or at the very least, pushed her away so they got to him first. That way he wouldn't have to count to ten before stepping into the bathroom and it wouldn't hurt him to breathe, knowing that she no longer could.
He knows that it's selfish, but he just wants to stop missing Francie.
He was too busy trying to capture happiness to see the danger that she was in. His hollow promises to spend his life with her ring in his mind over and over again.
He doesn't remember how he made it stop the last time. He doesn't know how make it better either, so he continues to sit by the bathtub and tries to convert the blank canvas into blue skies and white sand.