"Are you okay?"
She glanced upwards to see Arizona approaching and managed to give her a small smile. But truthfully, all she wanted to do was burst out crying.
She had pulled herself out of the crowd feeling suddenly overwhelmed, aimlessly wandering around for a while. Finally, she had retrieved to a quiet bench under two blossoming trees, with their pinkish petals shimmering under the sunlight as they fell softly to the ground.
She didn't know why she was feeling so emotional. Maybe it was because of the wedding... Everyone cried at weddings, didn't they? But then again, there had been no wedding so far, so that couldn't be it. Maybe that was why she was on the verge of crying. Because the bride and groom were nowhere to be found, and all her careful wedding planning had apparently gone to total waste. Did she have a curse or something, to ruin every wedding she invested in? Was this some cruel joke?
But a glance towards the crowd ahead of which she had just removed herself from, and she knew Jo and Alex weren't the ones responsible for her state. Somewhere on the right, dressed in a dark suit was Jackson, his hand over at Maggie's back. On the opposite side of the crowd was Matthew, waiting for her to return with a glass of champagne in his one hand.
Jackson and Maggie together. Matthew waiting for her.
April forced her eyes away, suddenly feeling the strong urge to puke.
"April? What's wrong?"
"It's... I..." she took a deep breath, unable to form an answer. She didn't have an answer, truthfully. Not one that didn't seem ridiculous, at least.
Arizona walked up to the bench and sat beside her, taking her hand in her own. Her expression was concerned. "Hey, I'm sure they are both okay if that's what you're worried about. They probably needed a moment to themselves, you know how those two get sometimes. Nobody can understand each other the way they do."
And April was about to reply that, even though it should, the couple wasn't what she was worried about... But those last words of Arizona's hit her out of nowhere, and she actually gasped as she heard them. The tension she had been feeling intensified immensely and finally she couldn't hold back the tears any longer.
"Whoa. Oh, my God, this is not about the guys." Arizona, confused as ever, reached out to her best friend to comfort her. "Did something happen? Oh God – is Harriet okay?"
"Yes, y-yes. Harriet is-s fine." April stammered.
"Then what is it?" Arizona's eyes were concerned.
April sighed. She then gulped. She should start at the beginning, she figured. "I quit too."
She blinked. "What?"
"I quit. My job at the hospital, I..."
"...When?"
"Last week."
Arizona's jaw was husking open. "What? Why didn't I know about this? W-Why?"
"There's this excuse I've been telling everyone but, honestly? I don't know. I only know that since the accident things have been spiraling out of control and I feel like..." April winced. "Okay, it might sound stupid, but I feel like I've been given a second chance and my feelings are all over the place and I just need... a new start."
"April I... I'm not following you."
April groaned, more tears coming out. "I feel like I screwed my life up. God had set out a path for me to follow and I completely messed up along the way, my marriage failed, my faith faded... and although at the end I was relatively happy, I wasn't really fulfilled, not nearly. And then I almost die and then I'm brought back and there's suddenly a whole new perspective there that I had never cared to notice because I was settled as I was... But suddenly now that's not enough." She sobbed. "The life I've been living doesn't seem enough and I don't know why, and I don't even like it! I was fine the way I was before. The past two years, I've been... I've been good. And you know, especially the past few months since I made up with God, I've been just fine. I was building a life again, with Matthew..."
April turned to Arizona, intensity in her characteristics. "But i don't think this was His plan either, because from the second the accident happened everything changed. My view of everything changed, I want more of my life than this safe settlement I've built, I want thrilling, breath-taking, maddening and electrifying. I have one life to live, and 'fine' isn't nearly enough. And what I'm realizing now is… Do you know when was the only time that my life wasn't just fine, when I woke up with a thrill every morning and went to bed with the warmest feeling of euphoria and love every night?"
It didn't take long for Arizona to realize what April was telling her. Even if it weren't for her words, she could still clearly see it in her hazel, worn out eyes. "Oh… Oh. Oh my God, April…"
More tears sprinted down the redhead's face and she looked away, to nowhere in particular. And then she sobbed, shaking her head in despair. "I don't know what to do, Arizona! I don't know what to think and what to feel and… I'm so confused, but if there's one thing that's stable in this world is my love for two people, my daughter and him. And I've been trying so hard to erase the second one from the list, but it's pointless. It's pointless, and I'm only realizing that now that it's too damn late! I'm such an idiot."
"You're not…" Arizona argued, but then she cocked her head. "Well, maybe you kind of are an idiot, but-"
April's next sob turned into a short laugh.
"-but," Arizona continued, a smile on her face. "I believe we just had the same conversation about me and Callie today, didn't we?"
April frowned, shaking her head. "No, this is not nearly the same thing."
"In what way?" the blonde asked incredulously.
"First of all, Callie is single."
"Barely." Arizona replied. "She and Penny split only last week. And I doubt that Jackson and Maggie are that serious, April."
"No, you don't know…" April winced, and a new round of tears escaped her eyes. "You don't know the whole story, that's why you're saying this."
And then April figured, if she wanted her friend's perspective, she might as well tell her the full story.
She gulped once. "Last year…" she began. Then gulped again. "In Montana... We… We had sex. And it wasn't just that, for a night it was as if the past three years of nightmares had never happened. It was… it was heaven Arizona, I can't even describe it. The way he looked at me, the way he touched me… the words he said, it honestly reminded me of our very first time in San Francisco, but it went infinite times deeper than that due to all our history ever since… and I never realized that it was our swan song. I thought it was a new start. And then, after that there was nothing but silence. And still I thought he was just going through a phase because of his father or something, but then the night of the fire…"
April's eyes shut closed. The tightening feeling in her chest was growing all the more intense as she spoke, and her throat felt like it was about to close. It didn't just feel like a lump in her throat, it felt like her airway was about to shut, like she was choking from all that emotion she was finally unleashing after burying down for so long. And where did she decide to do that? In a wedding, in a public open space with at least four hundred people around and the person in question, his partner and her partner about to stumble in on her any moment.
She took a few breaths, but the air wasn't clearly enough. She only realized her entire body was shaking when Arizona's arm rubbed her back in what was supposed to be a shooting gesture, yet it didn't help much.
Through everything, she managed to keep talking. "You should have seen the way he looked at her, Arizona. Like she was the only one in the room, the only one that mattered. Do you have any idea how heart-wrenching it was for me to witness that having been on the receiving end of that look mere weeks ago? And suddenly what, he forgot all about that and moved on, just like that? How could he do that, be what seemed like in love with me one moment and then fall out of love on the next? And why? What did I do, I was just being myself and…"
She sobbed again, suddenly remembering. "And he knew it, goddamn it. He knew that this was my biggest fear because I had told him myself. How nothing scares me like the thought that I can become ugly to someone who once thought all the stars were in my eyes. That he would fall out of love for the same reasons he fell in it. That my rambling would become annoying instead of cute, that my once endearing stubbornness would become refusal to compromise and my one track mind would be immaturity and my bad habits that he once adored would now be money down the drain. I freaking told him all that, one night as we held each other in our bed, and do you know what he said back?"
April's eyes met Arizona's, and what she saw in them stole away any answer she might have given.
"He told me that love wasn't just a feeling. Sometimes it came to be a choice. Sometimes, he said, the 'feeling of love' might vanish or fade when times get hard, that feelings are always changing. And that's when we have a choice. We can chose to open the communication, chose to identify what broke and how to fix it, and chose to recreate something worth falling in love with. Or we can choose to walk away.
"And then he said…" April swallowed, two fresh tears sliding down her face. "No, he promised… that even if he ever came to a point that he could no longer see the stars in my eyes, he would choose to look until he found them again.
"I can't even count the times he has broken that promise since then, Arizona." April's voice was beginning to fade, losing its energy. "And yet here I am, still seeing in him my whole entire universe. So do you wanna know what the difference is between your case and mine? It's that mine is the one that truly is a tragedy, that's the difference."
A long, endless moment of heavy silence passed between the two, and everything just spoken began to actually settle.
"April…" Arizona finally dared to whisper. "I don't know what to say…"
"Oh, what am I even saying? What the Hell?" April groaned, cutting her friend off. She buried her head in her hands, processing everything she has just said out loud and regretting all of it. "I don't know why I'm even doing this now, it's so stupid. And pointless and pathetic… God, I'm such an idiot." She repeated, and proceeded to wipe her wet cheeks with her wrists. "Alex and Jo will be here any minute, I have to get back."
"April, I don't think-"
"No seriously, forget we just spoke okay? Forget everything I just said." April sniffed once, then cleared her throat and stood up from the bench. "This never happened. Alright?" she all but demanded, not even looking at her.
Arizona's face was tortured. Seeing her best friend hurt like that was extremely hard on her. "But you meant every bit, didn't you? Forgetting isn't going to solve anything, April. You can't fix what you can't face."
And she just turned to stare at her incredulously, painfully aware of when she had last heard those words. And by whom.
At first she wasn't going to answer at all. She clenched her jaw and began walking towards the closest restroom to hide away any signs that she'd been crying. But in the last moment, she turned around to give Arizona one last glance.
"I love him." She admitted, a pained smile on her face. "And I can't fix it, I can't change it. And I can't, by any means, face it. All I can do…" she all but whispered. "Is learn how to live through it."
And then she turned and walked away, her wavy red hair bouncing along with her hurried steps.
[A/N] Quote about biggest fear based on an untitled poem by acutelesbian posted on tumblr.