Some days Brittany goes around with her earphones surgically attached to her ears.
Brittany calls those ones 'the musical days'. Her mother doesn't have a name for them, but she refers to them as those days sometimes, in a grim voice, eyes dreadful .
(Those days when you get so high strung that I'm afraid the mere sound of a pin dropping will break you; those days when I find you sleeping on the couch or under your bed, or sitting on a chair on the kitchen, bent in awkward angles, because you won't even look in the direction of the bed.
Those days when you walk around in steps so vacant, so empty, so hollow, that I want to hide you from the world and cry
Those days.)
The exact words elude her everytime she tries to relay them to Kurt (he looks at her and smiles, kissing her forehead and whispering i get it, honey. i get it, anyway) or to others (Santana holds her, her eyes ablaze and attentive but still distant in a way that always makes her stiffle whimpers after she's left), but they sound nice and comforting together. Coherent, helpful.
She always tries to remember them because they are hers to use, hers to explain, hers to give away. But when the correct phrasing slips away from her fingers for the nth time a sudden craving settles inside her stomach, plunging her moods to the floor, straddling them with strong legs and splayed vicious hands.
It's a feeling that she can't really put a name to, but it's similar to the distinct ache she gets when she's forgotten to eat one too many meals. It's some sort of hunger. A starvid something that slows her down for awhile and has her walking in a blurry haze.
With those words that drift away from her (they get twisted inside her mind until she can't really find their meaning, until they look deformed and idle, until she can't really put them anywhere else because they are either too big or too small), something else deserts her.
Her therapist is a round faced lady old enough to be her mother that smiles the brightest smiles she's ever seen; they're smiles full of dimples and teeth and stretching plump lips that always entice her to the point of broad grins, pink spots on her cheeks, and the incredible desire to sit there and watch her for hours.
(Britanny, she's drawn to smiles. She's always felt unnaturally attracted to them.)
Thursdays and Fridays are their days together. Twice a week Mrs. Montero takes her away from her doll houses full of expectations and lives made of rubber that -no matter how hard she tries- are never hers. Takes her away from her bedroom at night –dark, so very dark, so very frightening-, takes her away from loud steps on empty hallways, away from thousands of faceless people who pass her by and never even ask her name.
(What astounds her eeverytime is the amount of feeling about everything she tells. She's got a sort of broken fluidity that talks clearly about years upon years of living patiently inside a shell. A shell that never gives, that never fades; a shell that only opens up for a while so she can step inside and watch as things unfold in
i feel alone. i always feel alone. i don't know why. i'm never alone.
A har twirl, uncomplicated, soft. Moist eyes focusing somewhere on the wall, then:
everyone expects sudden brilliance from people who won't have it out of the blue. it's so strange, i feel like there's this giant wall between what they want and them; i think they keep scratching the same bricks over and over. They should knock the doors. maybe someone would answer.
Finally, Brittany looks at her –coy, sweet; blinking traces of stupor out of her blue, blue gaze-.
i never get angry, is that okay? i always hear about simmering rage, but i always feel white. white like a set of new walls. is that okay?
"Let's work on other things first, honey. How does that sound?"
Let's work on other things. She wants to say, Brittany, sweetie, you have to talk. You have to open your lips and express all of this; you have to come out from wherever you hide yourself all the time.
"Okay. Can we talk about Santana?"
That's her safe topic. She's always sure about how she feels about that girl. Love oozes out of her every single time she opens her mouth, coating her verbal stillness with a distracted warmth.
Love is such a strange thing to contemplate when it comes to Brittany Pierce. But it doesn't matter, she keeps making notes and helping her along when she stumbles over herself to form a simple sentence, and then she sits quietly –barely breathing- while the girl throws up dozens of analogies and metaphores and beautiful constructions that never come out after she's left the place.)
Most nights she works around the nightmares; if she didn't, she wouldn't sleep at all.
She puts her iPod on its deck and plays the same song over and over, until she can't remember the lyrics nor the meaning of the words she's listening to. Until her name doesn't sound articulate or lucid anymore. Until she can't tell a shadow from a person from her own sadness for the terrible sick feeling on her stomach.
Until she can sleep again, until there's blank space where dreams should be.
She calls them "the musical days", because music is the only thing that helps her keep her head above water, the only thing that makes her feel, feel, feel. Feel, and feel okay on top of that; music is the single thing that can stop the churning, burning, breaking, crying.
Words like serotonin come to her from books she hides under her flashy clothes on pale wooden drawers, and she thinks yeah, that's it.
Sleeping, waking up, eating, walking, trying to laugh, dancing, singing; sleeping, waking up, eating, walking, trying to laugh, dancing, singing...
Songs go by and she does these things that go through her head while she dubs her despair with borrowed expressions.
(She's not afraid of ceasing to breathe, she's not afraid to fall off from her life and end somewhere else, she's not afraid of slipping up and crushing her dreams; she is, however, deathly afraid of silence and what it entails. Deathly afraid of opening her mouth and finding that she can't use her voice anymore, not even in her faltering verbalizations.)
.