Clarabelle pins the butterfly hairpin into her fringe and her hands are shaking.
It was Lenka's trinket. She'd worn it often, to the side of her head where her hair tucked its way into tidiness, and it had caught the light and held it to her like a halo and Clarabelle had been prepared to spend the rest of her life worshipping Lenka like she was a goddess of some sort and it feels like a hollow gesture, moving into the shell left behind so nicely by the girl with the eyes that saw further than most.
It chills her. She wishes she weren't so weak, so willing to let the thought creep underneath her skin, and that thought just opens up the way to thinking that she shouldn't have let Lenka in so easily either and her hands are shaking so bad that she can't bring herself to continue getting on with her preparations for the day until she has peeled off her socks with her toes and pressed the soles of her feet into the floor and tried to feel like the world isn't spinning away from her.
Her hands slam onto the wood of her dressing table and her arms are shaking too and she doesn't feel anything but she stares into the mirror and that's a stab in the heart because she doesn't see anything there that looks right. There's her face, of course, but it's stuck in the trappings of everything she swore once that she'd never adopt again.
She stares at the butterfly and the butterfly looks dull.
In the kind of daze she forces herself into for family functions and dealing with either corpses or her superiors, she finishes getting dressed and put-together and as little ornamented as she thinks she can get away with, and she's still not wearing her shoes as she leaves her house, doesn't care if she spears her foot through the first wickedly rusty nail she comes across because there doesn't seem to be any point any more and every gleam of light is the shine of Lenka's eyes and every hunch-shouldered butch she sees is a reminder of what she's lost and she is mourning still, in these unfamiliar streets, in this situation that she's not entirely comfortable with yet, though of course she doesn't think it's one that she can reasonably get out of.
She wonders if Lenka thinks of her, wherever she is, and she doesn't for a moment doubt that Lenka's alive and well because there is no way that Lenka would allow herself to get into trouble without a fight, because Lenka was the toughest person Clarabelle ever knew, even if she didn't necessarily show it off to the world. She wonders what it would be like if Lenka had stayed. If they'd have had a future.
She wonders if there would ever have been a way they could have worked out. If the world would have become brighter after that one terrible weekend instead of its every light winking out. If something else, anything else, had happened.
The world is solid underneath her and the sun burns against the small of her neck because her hair is in two bunches now and she hates how it looks but it's better than cutting it thin and soft and girly, at least she can rearrange it now with no fuss, and it seems inconceivable that she and Lenka still live in the same world.
Every step is a wonder and a doubt and a complete and utter lack of will to go on and so she can't bring herself to care much when the car slams into her.
A/N: I read an article once that talked about the boundaries of healthy and unhealthy relationships. I think this is turning out to have been a pretty unhealthy one so far.
~Mademise Morte, October 27, 2012.