In reality, it's no different than any other day.
She and Jane share their first kiss, but since it's under the guise of their undercover personas, it does nothing except fuck her up emotionally. Every night when she goes home she thinks about making it her final day at BPD but every morning she returns.
At this point, she's pretty much numb.
She feels like a bird with broken wings. She's desperate to get away but she just can't do it. The melody of her life is a haunting litany of dissonant notes and sometimes she thinks about putting a pillow over her head to drown out the sounds of failure around her.
Maura thinks her eyes seem dimmer, less green even, than they used to be. They are no longer emerald or hazel or jade; they're just listless, no sparkle or shimmer or gleam. The only saving grace is the slanted cut of her hair and the way it sweeps across her eyes and conceals them from scrutiny.
There are times where she feels like a senior citizen with her nostalgic recollections of how it was back in the day, how it used to be. Everything gets compared to the past, and the good times that she holds the present in opposition to keep getting further and further away.
One night she woke up in a panic, drenched in sweat, because she dreamt that her heart just stopped beating. That it couldn't take any more pain and suffering and stress and so it simply quit. She brought out her stethoscope that morning and sometimes after a really long day she listens to her own heartbeat, just to be sure.
Looking in the mirror is like looking at a stranger.
The changes she sees are startling and stark. The worry lines are deeper, more pronounced, than she recalled. There are bags under her eyes all the time, and her sleeplessness certainly isn't helping.
On Tuesday, Maura looks in the mirror and notices eight new wrinkles. At least five are solely from frowning, she thinks, and of those, four are from frowning at Jane.
She exists in a constant state of confusion; she knows exactly what she's doing when she's on the job and doesn't have a clue when she clocks out at night.
All the anguish and heartache in her life used to make her feel isolated and lonely but now she doesn't even have the energy for that. She just is now, because it's all she can manage.
If there is an afterlife, Maura isn't sure she wants to be a part of it. After this life, she thinks that what her soul will really need is sleep. Final, restful, sleep.
At daybreak, when she forces herself out of bed, she never feels more than half-alive.
Given the chance to have an audience with God, one of her priorities would be asking for some uninterrupted rest.
Her life is full of endless sorrow, and how she's so painfully aware of that makes her feel worn. Threadbare.
There are no longer any fireworks for her. No romances or friendships or sparks of hope and life around her. To send off fireworks you have to light a match and everything radiant in her has long since been extinguished.
But she has given up wishing for it to change. Even as she bitterly thought, Happy Birthday, Maura, and blew out the candles on her cake this past year, she didn't wish for anything at all.
Because no matter what she wishes for, tomorrow will be the same.
The oppression will not relent. The agony will not abate. The joy will not return.
There is no protection from the demons that she faces, day in and day out, nor from the ones that follow her into her sleep.
She keeps things in boxes in her mind, one for feelings and one for work and one for friendships and one for everything else, to keep herself sane.
Compartmentalizing. She's an expert now, at tucking things away into neatly marked spaces in her mind.
She has long since forgotten how to hope.
Looking around at the haggard faces of her coworkers she thinks about preparation for the changes that are lurking on the horizon. She thinks about retirements and promotions and transfers and how, inevitably, this thing they have will come to an end.
It has been weeks since she felt beautiful. Too much of the filth, the grime and sludge, that they deal with every day clings to her skin.
She lies with impunity now, to everyone around her. When they ask how she's doing, she always says fine. She thinks they know she's lying, but calling her on it would mean exposing a weakness in all of them that none of them know how to face.
Underneath the half-truths and white lies, Maura isn't sure she actually knows how she's doing. And she wonders if lying to yourself is a sin.
She tries to pinpoint the moment she first lied without hyperventilating. It's not difficult. She can recall it to the second.
Her emotions used to be something she would consciously hide. She'd hide them from Jane, from her colleagues, from anyone who tried to see through her delicate armor. And then her feelings and thoughts hid themselves, without any effort on her part, and she let them fade back without question.
It seemed easier that way, somehow.
When she was younger she tried to keep a diary once, because all the other girls were doing it, but she couldn't think of anything to write in it that wouldn't pen the ugly truth about her parents and her feelings and her warped half-life with them. It's like that now too; she wouldn't have anything to record except for violence and hatred and failure and loss.
The dissolution of her personal fabric, of the very essence of who she is, was an unforeseen consequence of joining BPD. She couldn't have known that it would happen, that this would be the ultimate result, but she isn't sure that knowledge would have forced her to choose something else.
Her volunteering for BPD wasn't conditional upon it making her a better person or helping her emotionally or furthering her career. She hadn't known that Maura Isles would disappear, replaced by something else entirely, but she no longer has the strength to fight it, to see it as a loss.
It is what it is.
Even when there are clear skies she feels like there is a shadow cast over her. The heartache she lives with is inescapable. It is a permanent fixture, as much a part of her as fair skin or dimples or her Jimmy Choos.
There are times when she is fueled entirely by caffeine. When she is so wired she can't stop her hands from trembling. Even then she's the most precise practitioner in the morgue, hands down.
Some people would probably call it insanity, the way she is letting herself be so entirely consumed by the job. And maybe it is foolish. But no words can convince her that what she does isn't worth it.
She is a study in martyrdom, in sacrifice.
The stages of her decay are punctual in their arrival, corresponding perfectly to the length of her time in the unit, the cases that wear on her hardest, the times Jane lets her down most.
She puts her rare, little moments of happiness in a piggybank. She'll cash in on them when she retires, so that there is more for her to think about when she's old and alone than the hollow eyes of victims and the ruthless faces of villains and the long, lonely nights she spends wondering where it all went wrong.
Recovering from the depths to which she has fallen would be like seeing the same shooting star twice in a lifetime. It's beyond a statistical impossibility. It is unfathomable.
The evidence of her existence is fading, and the more she dims in her personal life the harder she fights in her professional life. If not for her job, she thinks she might disappear. Without it, she might not be real.
There is a chance that she doesn't exist at all.
Perhaps she's a figment of imagination, summoned by the victims to herald them through the torture of their ordeals. And if she stops helping them, stops pursuing justice and offering comfort, then there will no longer be a need for her.
And she will vanish.