She watched the light play on the surface of the liquid, little threads of white making their way jaggedly through the miniature lake. Her eyes were fixed on the rim, tracing and retracing the circular structure as though stalking her kill. Something so rudimentary to her profession, so molecularly unsuspecting, and yet it held a power over her like a rabbit lusting after an invisible carrot. So utterly futile, and yet she couldn't abandon the chase. Couldn't relinquish her hold on it.
Then again, perhaps it was the opposite. She'd never really held the reigns in the strange courtship that was herself and vodka.
Her mouth twisted into a masochistic little smirk, imagining the scene as a stranger would. Her seraphic child, mercifully asleep upstairs, unaware that through the floor was a hell only his mother dwelled in. A mobile hell, at that. The wedding photo on the end table leered at her, taunting her with a happiness she'd never really had. She'd been floating on air when the flash had gone off, weightless with the moment, but happy? Not really. She couldn't comprehend such a complex facet of human emotion. Happiness was a concept that had a mutually exclusive relationship with the demons of her id. Moments were all she was granted. Moments that could extend for as long as she was able to repress the things clawing at her from within. The inevitable circles of hell waiting to engulf her.
Her fingers wrapped possessively around the base of the glass, fingertips white as she pressed them into the cold, hard material. Sand melted and compacted until it formed something so entirely unlike its original self that it was unrecognizable. Like her. Burned and pressed into an alien form that she didn't know, didn't want to. Ice rapped dully against the sides of the glass as she made a languid circle, watching the clear liquid circle the inside, rolling off the cubes as though it were an entity in and of itself. She brought it to her lips and shut her eyes, hoping that if perhaps she did not watch it go in, it wouldn't be real. Her life would not have tumbled to pieces around her, left her prey to her own vulture-like mind.
God, she wanted his arms around her, holding her in place so as not to collapse under the rubble of expectations. His lips on her skin, searing his intentions into her. Promising he wouldn't leave her to this. To herself.
But he had, she noted, as the burn of the alcohol slid over her lips. Few people had any desire to let vodka linger in their mouths for more than a brief moment, but she reveled in its bitter burn, a just punishment for imbibing it at all. Tilting her head back, a sigh cascading from her nostrils, she let it sear its path down her throat, into her stomach, into her veins. She hated it and she loved it. Her own personal metaphor for life.
It had never really been a matter of being alone. She'd been alone before. Hell, she'd lived her life alone. But never lonely. Never once had she felt the ache of desperate isolation.
She sipped again, letting the sting of the ethanol numb her tongue, waiting for the inevitable delirium of believing she'd found a solution.