From the hallway into your room
I can see you before the moon
Understand me my blue eyed son
I do not wish to see you gone
Look away if you don't like the sound
I could not share what I have found
"Blue Eyed Son," Birdie
Alice stood against the cold stone wall where it turned to obscure view and sobbed in a passion, trying as best she could through this wicked fit to hold in the ugly sound, but as it was, the wind was pulling up at her coat, insisting upon itself so, so that she could hardly be heard over it anyway. Regardless, the shame was a tricky fog, a miasma around her middle to mix with her self-pity, clouding better judgment, her heart of hearts which knew that this was a very silly thing to do given the circumstances, and she turned her face into it, covering her mouth and hoping it would just leave.
But it didn't, and she made a sound as though she were laughing—ah ha ha ha ha ha—tears flowing out of her to leave angry red tracks that would only stain raw her cheeks. As intelligent as she was, Alice was a relatively new soul to grief, and her situation at the moment felt like a slap across her mouth, smarting where it shouldn't have.
Friendships end; sometimes their dissolution is inescapable. Whether they fade or die, whether they are murdered by the invisible hand of fate or from the caustic shock of a social faux pas, all things come to an end, and even the most celebrated union of minds and excited, near-constant meetings and conversations devolve by months and then years of nothing, and nothing. Perhaps some people can pick up the threads again in a cosmic game of Cat's Cradle and go easily along as though nothing has changed, no time has passed. But sometimes friendships fall apart.
A bloody, raging endfight lets one knows where one stands—ardent points recalled, the pride of battle scars-and there is a thin line between love and hate marked by fervent passion. But a passive retreat with no explanation or signs of decay is worrisome. We look up one day and find that our friend is nowhere near us, and we ask ourselves why they would stop talking to us in a very quiet and subtle sort of way. Do their excuses, if we ever see them again, ring true or crack with flat falsity? Perhaps we are to blame for owning some fatal flaw they have tolerated til now but can no longer weigh comfortably against the benefits of our character. They simply drift away, slipping off into unparted crowds of people while we watch with no words that would recall them to us. Anyone can find him or herself trapped in a peculiar eddy, the dying friendship with no real event horizon, one circling the drain but never quite exiting the ride.
Older people and liars might tell us not to lay blame for disappearance, or warn against developing a toxicity by desperate need to understand where it went wrong—sometimes people just move on, dear. But that innate need to understand creates a conviction that this friend would tear out her own fingernails to escape, we must be so vile, searching our personality for the weeping pustules, and knowing perfectly well that it's immature to be so melodramatic and feeling ashamed to lose tears over something this trivial—it is then that we age a bit, and sour, and begin to fully resent people for making us feel feelings from which they are removed or perhaps blissfully unaware, and resent ourselves for feeling guilty for resenting them.
Alice was removed from being then herself, because in truth these were heady days, fueled by a valve she could not check, one that frequently surged of its own impetus, let the dial pop and crack, the needle blurring, sometimes filling her up so fast she nearly burst, sometimes leaving her so alone that she could barely hear herself existing. And as though to demonstrate it, she suddenly stopped crying and thought to herself again how foolish she was, how absolutely mindless and humiliating to be crying like this, How can you be so dispassionate when I have trusted and confided in you; maybe it would be better if I hid from you every time I saw you just to make you feel the way that I do.
She was unfolding her pocket handkerchief when out he came from an archway, very sudden-like, striding across the stone walk with a strange, listless purpose, which altered course when he spotted her.
"Oh," he said, and almost rocked back on his foot. "Hullo." There were probably ten steps between them, and neither moved closer. "Why are you crying?" She thumbed the monogram on the cloth.
"I don't know," Alice replied in a low voice, and felt like crying again, her tear ducts pinching together as if they could draw up the water from her bones. Her forehead was aching, and she said, "How have you been?" by way of changing the subject in a half-wistful, half-bitter sort of voice. He looked down at the toes of his shoes.
"Ah, busy... very busy, with—with lecture." And he halfway winced, as though he knew a poor answer, and it was. She had seen him from across the quad through the gate several times since that summer, carrying his equipment up to the roof near Old Tom, photographing it from angles this way and that, hovering and then shifting back and forth over the still box. Alice ground the ball of her foot into the grass, knowing what she wanted to say but feeling frustrated and overheated and embarrassed that he had to look at her now. If she did say it, it would hardly come out for the rippling cracks and fissures in her voice.
"You are much missed," she said, but couldn't get past that, and settled for watching a steamy cloud above the treeline. She wasn't quite sure if she missed him, or missed the memory of what he had been before. "It has been very strange without you." He sighed, hesitated, and shifted the strap on his arm.
"The world is a strange place; I'm not the only decision-maker." He was not looking at her but up, north, as though he could see into the town through the walls. "I didn't create this world, unfortunately, or the outcome would be a bit different, perhaps."
"I don't know why you don't come around for us anymore. We practically spent the whole summer in the college, dull and stupid. We had so much fun with you, and now everyone is talking about Seasons and... " Alice sighed. "Are we boring now? If we are, it was an accident, we never meant it." He worried over his lip, moving it slightly, thinking with eyes wide and distant.
"Of course it isn't your fault," he said in a bland voice, but she did not believe that she believed him, for she had heard her mother talking in a voice that whispered of wrongdoing and spoke of new education and the future. "Sometimes people separate and move forward with their lives. It isn't necessarily a bad thing, even if it breaks us all apart." Alice looked up at him, hearing her governess tramping to call to her over the lawn, watched him glance up and react, "I would hope that you do not forget me; you and I were excellent friends, weren't we. I never was so inspired before." He was beginning to step back, in motion even as she took a deep breath.
"Goodbye, Reverend," and she felt the brief flashing hope that she would never see him again, if only to feel the spite and smother herself in it.
"Afternoon," and then he was striding off again while the governess pulled up short to gaze off after him for a mile-long second. Alice put the handkerchief into her pocket, felt the long loop of string with its ends tied together, and wondered what she could do with it now.
She was moving softly in the dark hall toward the exact spot where there was just a bit less blackness, twiddling with her cuffs, trying to pull them down as far as she could and squeezing her hands into fists, the early coal grey barely reaching in under the closed door nearby, which she did not touch. There was no real purpose in idling here, nothing she could do now in the early morning hours or really ever, save trying to pull everything just a bit closer, but despite the non-routine associated with that room, she paused for just a moment to tug at her cloak and throw a passing glance over her shoulder, then felt the stairs and the door and went out into the field and the thick wooly scuntch scuntch of her boots and snow.
Almost immediately her elbows of their own accord went rigid against her ribs, and she squeezed her fists again as hard as she could before giving up and stuffing them tucked under her arms before she'd even reached the slate fence. It wasn't that she didn't enjoy the long walk for the cold, as it was bitterly enough that puffs of steam sprang up in her wake; what made her shrug her shoulders and press her chin into her collarbone was the early morning darkness.
Hours later, when she would be nearly done and the sun would rise high enough, it would be hazy and everywhere and she could never quite tell where it sat in the sky, piercing somewhere far above her its distant silver light, cold and disaffected. Here and now, Dawn couldn't be bothered to cast down onto the girl more than a laconic eye, the ugly orange slash on the horizon; there was no striking sunrise stretching and tuning its beams out here. Deep purpling grey clouds set to push back the light until it was nearly a sad enough affair to simply call it a day and want to spend the rest of it in bed.
But she couldn't, and the new night's snowfall made the great wooden door a scraping, tugging strain, and she could hear them inside, shifting and waking and glistening their eyes in the lamplight she had pooled out of nothing, and panting she sat down, pressing her forehead into the great flank, and thought with her hands and not with her head.
In a way it was like being an insomniac.
She had had nights before with some un-understood premonition of what was to come, knowing somewhere in the back of her mind that this would be a night like that, that she would climb into bed and close her eyes and feel comfortable and secure and would simply wait as the night went past, helpless and seething at whatever about it was offbalance. The strange globular feeling of being tired and worn did not dissipate in these times as it had in the past, even though she did sleep.
Alice never really knew what sort of expression her face fell into whenever she turned her head like that to look into the room she passed every morning—this morning in particular. Whether it was one of nostalgia or veiled resentment, perhaps an occlusion was for the better, for the better that nobody knew, and Alice did not know herself.
Even if Alice had had a mirror to look into, she would not have done it, for she was tight and pale with the melancholia that she had borne upon her back across the Waste and the Outer Territories. It wasted no time in attaching itself, not unlike a ball of thorns bumbling along behind the two of them, excited by the possibility threaded between the looser curls coming out of her wilted bun. It overshot the next bounce and thatched itself between her shoulder blades, clawed and snagged to the wool, and there it stayed. She cried with frequency, but not without good reason, giving her a prolonged sense of malaise and a deadness in the bridge of her nose. Her fringe grew long that winter, hastily swept back with everything else, with all the work and the mass of the rest of her hair, but Alice did not see a mirror for a long time, and remained unaware of this development.
They had blown over the moors with their coats pulling always at them, making them feel heavy and early exhausted. For Alice this was compounded by the Hatter careening numbly between dragging her forward with a too-sharp energy that seemed played out as soon as it began, and lagging on her, nearly leaning her backwards. For weeks afterward she would feel a vague chafing at her ankles from the wind in her skirts, and his phantom hand ringing her wrist. Alice did not bivouac beneath crags and drink from pools of gathered raindrops in the bowl of a rock as lost heroines do. Instead at moonset, still in the black of morning, there stood a sagging barn with the first layers of wood peeling off the boards, and the Hatter collapsed in the hayloft onto his back, gone before the dry airborne strands settled back over him, dis-engaged from the world in this strange condition that was more a forceful and voracious state of unconsciousness than sleep.
Alice dozed with her temple against the wood when she was not worrying over the intense and painful pressure curling in riptide waves out of her stomach from the hunger pangs. It is a difficult thing to be hungry, and even worse to be concerned about the future on top of that, but of far, far greater concern to have another being within the sphere of responsibility. He did not wake, he did not stir, he did not move, he did not twitch his fingers and toes. The Hatter simply lay in the corner where he had shut down and there he stayed until Alice woke in the late afternoon and remembered.
She shuffled and creased her way into the corner where his trajectory had deposited him and waved away tendrils of stale hay, looking into the Hatter's etiolated face and the deep quiet lines beneath his eyes. Still in the off switch; she could barely tell if he were breathing, and put her hand close to his parted mouth to tell. He jerked to life only to turn the blank expression in another direction without opening his eyes, and so Alice had it in mind to see if there was any promise of something to eat. She rose, growing stiff and impatient, and promptly found a small herd of Normande cows living beneath the hay loft—which alarmed her, not because they were there, but because her first thought was that finding their feed and picking through it actually sounded like a promising sort of idea.
Barring this, however, Alice decided that the best thing was to see if there was a farmhouse paired with the barn. She was soon trembling, weak, with her foot on the last rung of the ladder and making her way out of the barn and into a fresh casting of snow up past the tops of her boots. She blinked, and she was standing at the door, wobbling slightly.
"Oh, hello, HELLO!" cried voices within, and the young lady suddenly remembered that she was on the lam with an escaped convict whom she herself had sprung loose, which probably meant that she was in an awfully good volume of trouble herself, and stood in the snow getting soaked and red-raw for a decent minute and a half before recognizing that a man and a woman were ushering her inside with the greatest of relief on their handsome features.
Fortunately or unfortunately for her, the high-borne people living in this house fancied themselves on some adventurous holiday acting as a farmer and his wife, mistook Alice's sad, half-lidded expression and the habit she had developed of tilting her head slightly to the right out of exhaustion and physical ache for one of great nobility and nuanced experience in the world, and wrongly assumed her to be an aristocrat playing the same grand game of dress-up as they. It did not take much in the way of logic for Alice to reach this conclusion, that they were aping at rustic life and were quite glad to have someone about, for they made her stand dripping at the matting, watching the both of them while they talked at her for a good quarter hour.
They were basically useless, for neither of them had any idea how to do anything of any importance besides dressing and posturing in imitations of what they believed farmers and farmer's wives to be like and do, the man draping himself in manly fashion upon the mantle to gaze self-importantly into a crackly fire and the woman simply holding a ball of yarn in her hands, turning it over and again as though this would conjure her up a magic pair of mittens. Toward the end of all this the remark went round that Alice would be a fine girl indeed as the wife had been of the past Season enciente and needed a hand or two about the place.
"Well," said Alice in what was really polite effete declination but tended toward sounding neighborly and officious, "I can't say I've ever worked a farm, exactly—"
"Bit of a dismal landscape, I must say the society isn't much, but we've got enough food, and we'll give you an honorarium, a token, as one does," said the farmer, and waved his hand lightly, laughing. Alice shut her open mouth with a click at this intriguing statement, and her raised eyebrows seemed to give it all the air of a done conclusion; the farmer's wife clapped her hands in glee, skipping toward the steamer trunk in the corner and mining out hardy rough togs and kerchiefs and chattering away about the snug little château at the top of the combe.
Alice received the threaded folds and a slab of rye into her arms somewhat unwittingly and ultimately with a bit of trepidation, and thus began her season of gallimaufries.
She had finished now, and leaned back on the stool. It was still quiet and warm in the barn, and this combined with the last pail meant she had a moment to sit, and this meant that her thoughts came out, and this gave her pause to suddenly slump forward in complete silence for a moment, pressing her cheeks and mouth very hard into her open hands.
"You're spoiling the milk doing that," said a voice overhead which Alice had not heard before, and she sat up from where her forehead was pressed into the cow's flank to look all around her before she saw the cat sitting atop the bovine's rump. It was a dark barncat, no relative to the Cheshire, and it flicked its tail, stared unblinking with neat little paws. Alice stared down into the contents of the pail and felt another teardrop roll into it from the end of her nose.
"I'm sorry," Alice said in a bleak voice that barely registered. She pressed the back of her hand to her chin, her apron ever stained now with dark spots from the tears, wincing at a fresh pinch.
"Why are you doing that?" it continued.
"What?"
"That, why are you doing that?"
"Oh, hush, you!" The cow at Alice's knees had turned her nose back to them, and chewing in circles around her cud, gave the cat a look. "She's sad, and she can be sad, too," this with a self-important snuffle, nose firmly into the air. The cat tracked its own smooth glance back to the milkmaid.
"Why are you sad?" it demanded without sympathy.
"I have a friend who is ill," she replied.
"The sleeping one, with the hair?" cried another bovinus voice nearby, terribly excited. The old girl jerked up her head again and cried in a most exasperated outburst,
"Eavesdropping!" to which the interloper responded in stuttering murmurs and gentle outrage that such juicy gossip would be denied them all in their time of need. The Bessie continued in a shrill voice, "Good Lord, if you're going to listen, be discreet about it!"
"What's wrong with him?" the cat asked her.
"I don't know," said Alice, not moving. "Everything."
"You're angry with him," said the cat astutely, gaining interest. The cows were silent, and Alice could hear tails flipping over on themselves. "We never see him, what does he do all day?"
"Nothing," said Alice. "Absolutely nothing." She withdrew from her cloak and set on the hay all the silly little trinkets the farmer's wife had given her, and said, "This is everything I have in the entire world. I could live right here in the hayloft and it wouldn't be any different." The cat stayed where it was, peering carefully, and Alice sighed.
What had he done in the time that she was milking and chopping wood and committing herself to the dairy rigors the farmer's wife found entertaining and delightful? Where was he while her hands were cold, raw, and creased, her mouth small, her heart too cautious to beat very hard in this weather? She found all the evidence every evening when she came back, pots and pans stacked across the furniture and the floor, strung up in front of the door like a rope of alarm bells. Lugging a pail with her arms gone dead she managed to destring herself from a casserole dish lid and three ramequins without slopping the buttermilk. Alice stood up straight to watch him edge down the stairs at the awful sound, only to be caught tight at it being merely her before rotating coldly and climbing the stairs for bed again. The girl went for the pail handle but couldn't lift; inside was her boot and the leg attached to it, not quite covered in the entire day's take, what she'd been paid in, ruined and leaving her with early washing on top of that.
She even found him once sitting inside the wardrobe, another time in the empty bathtub having dragged the ticking mattress off the bed and fitted it over the top like a cave, hiding, always with this hiding, which she would have preferred over the furniture ordeal once that began. She thought she was lucky when he stuffed the kitchen table and the shredded parlor rug up the chimney flue, glad and sickened to see that the motheaten gold velvet sofa in the attic sewing room was still there for her long, strange nights. She hauled firewood on a wire across the dell only to find it gone missing, spent in the pursuit of a hot bath by someone who lay for hours across a moldering four poster with the tree of life across the headboard, sleeping or not, she never knew. On that day she had stood in the kitchen below in a white hot panic before saying to the ceiling,
"What is wrong with you?"
She repeated the question later, louder, standing at the door of the upstairs bedroom while he stood at the window looking out. Alice had returned from the second of the day's milkings to find the entire house bolted against her, and stood shouting at the window in the snow for an hour, practically weeping in rage and frustration when the lock finally broke at her repeated kicks.
"You shouldn't even be here," he told the window.
"And what is that supposed to mean?"
"It means you shouldn't be here." She threw her hands up weakly and let them slap against her dress.
"Perhaps I'd better go, then."
"Perhaps you better had." He said this in the most curious tone of voice, but Alice went completely numb between her wrists and her ankles in shock.
"I don't regret what I did," she said viciously, "But you are pressing me, and far too hard, and I have my breaking points." He did not answer, and she turned and slammed the door so hard the glass trembled in the lead.
Alice looked down into the bucket of buttermilk, but couldn't find where her tears had been subsumed into the mixture.
"I wonder if it isn't worth salvaging at this point," said Alice. "I suppose... I suppose I'm a frightful mess," she whispered on, and the cow replied in a soothing voice, but the girl was beginning to fall asleep on the milking stool and put her hand into her dress pocket for her handkerchief, instead finding the yarn the farmer's wife had given her the day before after churning butter.
"But you're a good girl," the cow was saying, "It's nice to have someone look after us the way you do."
She held the yarn at both ends between her fingers before bringing the tips together and slowly tying a knot to make a large loop. Alice held it out between her hands and cast back to her memories with the Reverend. She slowly wound it once around her palms, fearing she'd forgotten how, and then strung the ends with her fingers for the Diamonds, and then Alice wondered what she would do with it now.