A/N: So I figured I'd fiddle around with Ann's character a bit, nail down some disillusionment. I guess this is a drabble of sorts – me just playing around with language and such. It still fits within the context of the story, but I suppose it's a bit later on in the overall timeframe. As I said, though, I'll mostly just be jumping around time wise, seeing if everything falls into place.
Warnings: Angst and flowery prose.
Caution, Baby, Caution, Don't Dream Too Far Away
It was the smell of coffee that hit her hard as she stumbled through the lobby. That sterile, too clean smell of hospital coffee, watered down by rules, regulations, litigations and other structured methods of organizing these messy, unorthodox human animals into neat little boxes labeled YES or NO. It was this coffee that complimented geometric stacks of forms, headed by blocks of harsh, militaristic lettering, which ordered frazzled, sleepless patients to fill out lines of barely comprehensible jargon with ballpoint pens that traced crude canals in the white pages: indents flecked with miniscule dots of black ink – rotten, ugly scratches in this neat fluorescent world. This – this! – is what she had built herself up to. This world, which no amount of flipping through highlighter and Red Bull stained textbooks, her veins pumping in a frenzied tango to the beat of Adderall in a dark dorm room under the white hot spot light of a desk lamp, could prepare her for. Not for the dried up pens and rigid forms. Not for the coffee.
The lobby passed by in a tired, fevered blur and she was facing the glass doors, those perfect, crystalline glass doors, which whisked back and forth on their tracks to the sound of a mechanical breeze. She looked at them every day and, though she tried not to, she always found smudges on them. She'd walk. Sixteen blocks. The sky (a pale gray mass stretched above her, illuminated from behind and shot through with streaks of red like an infection) looked ready to break, to burst, to release with pain and relief a torrent of snow that would cocoon the world, or southern Indiana which, essentially, was her world, in a frozen baptism that ached with silent stagnation. And she would walk. Sixteen blocks she'd walk.
The world pulsed all around her in the intangible light of the predawn – a static, shifting glow that hovered about the lampposts (still cascading streams of orange across the streets so black and still that they seemed ready to crack with tension) and the trees. And she was alone. She was alone within it all and she thought of headlights reflected in the snow – snow, which had grown black like tar and melted three days before, only to be followed by a bitter spell so frozen that it had cauterized the tear-ducts of the sky with ice, preventing any further secretions from escaping into the dried up husk of a world that was Midwestern America in the winter. Only now was it becoming warm again. Warm enough to snow. It was January and the wind tasted dry and stale as it often does when nature blends with culture.
Yet, here she was in suburbia, a land so genuinely confident in its own appearance, and the deeper internal reflection of this moreover, that it required no dry cement walls to divide and constrain the properly constructed, perfectly organized houses, merely allowing their backyards to sprawl into one another in a manner that society would rarely permit in the realm of human behavior. And here was her house – perfectly constrained, perfectly free. She'd hardly noticed the walk. Sixteen blocks.
And her key was in the door and a symphony awaited her. A symphony of half-gray bluish light and memories that never were. Her footsteps were loud on the carpet, loud in a way that no one could hear and she thought that she might make coffee. It would be nice to make coffee (delicious, nutty, earthy coffee – nothing like that infectious, anxiety-ridden mess from earlier) and sit there with her hands wrapped around the warm ceramic cup (eggshell, her mother had insisted on the eggshell tinted mugs – plain, nothing too flashy) and greet the dawn as if it were something beautiful, something sublime, and not just one more calculated, scientific motion that brought her noticeably closer to the moment in which she resigned herself to occupying one of those robotic, impersonal hospital beds that she so dutifully returned to everyday. She would watch the steam rise.
There was everything mathematical about making coffee. Six cups of water. Pour into the machine. Four tablespoons of ground coffee. Shake into the filter. The press of a silver button and a domestic red light snaps to life. Mathematical. Or perhaps just methodical. But beautiful? Certainly not. Certainly not sublime… Yet, in a way. Yet, in a way it was all she had. All she had to remind her of a night that was beautiful if not sublime. A night when she had made coffee instead of tea and the air rang thick with words never spoken. A year ago. Maybe more. Yes, it was summer then – a summer night that she still clung to the way a drowned man, who has not yet been informed that his last breath has long since passed, clings to the little spot of light hundreds of murky leagues above his head. The coffee began to percolate – hollow drops against the glass.
She could think about that night, oh Lord; she could dance with that night through the entire gray morning if she wanted to. It could entice her and ensnare her and seduce her and she would belong to it for as long as it wanted, until her pager buzzed her into the dull, gray world that was somehow less real than the purple memories through which she swam. Purple hope – the color of bruises and sin. The color of exhaustion and the bags under her eyes that would later be blotted out with foundation and espresso and the promise of memories to sink into once again.
The clouds broke briefly and the sunlight came through the window – shades of gold and orange and molten, molten bliss and she wanted it to be sublime. She wanted to touch it, to taste it, to mold it and have it be meaningful. But even as the light dashed itself upon the glass and split into a million screaming fragments and was the color of everything beautiful, she knew that she was still here. And only here. In goddamn southern Indiana. And what does that do for you? What does that ever do for you?
The coffee maker emitted a high-pitched wail and for a moment it seemed at one with the light. They complimented each other, twisting and turning about one another in a complicated mingling of abstract stimulation. And then it stopped. And Ann was alone in her kitchen as dawn broke and the smell of mediocre coffee permeated the air.