I’ll Wait For You

I can try again? Then this might happen again. My other tube might explode, and then where will I be? I’d be just existing. There’s not so much fun in just existing. It’s like a plastic bottle, floating on the sea. It just drifts, wherever the currents go, and it might be washed up somewhere, but that doesn’t matter, because it’s a plastic bottle, and no one wants an empty one.

Then there’s the little issue that no man would want me if I couldn’t provide a family. Hell, I wouldn’t want me. Aidan was right. I am cursed. I thought he was just being a stupid bas*ard but there might be something in what he was saying after all. Everything about this is wrong and I know I should appear strong to everyone else, and act like it’s not a problem. But I’ll lose him. I’ll lose Kostya. I love him and I’m sure he loves me, but this is the kind of sh*t that breaks relationships.

The self-pity hit Elinor strongly. She didn’t usually give way to such notions, because they served no purpose in solving anything, but right at this moment, all the bad things she kept corked up seeped their way through her inner armor. And, along with them, when she tried to think of words to song, to think of the positive things, like Stolen Heart beginning their tour, like how happy her mother had been to get the coffee machine, and her dad’s gaping wonder when she gave him his car, registered under his name. He had his heart set on a Nissan Leaf, but Kostya advised Elinor that the model would be too small, perhaps, for four people to sit comfortably within, and she got him a Volkswagen e-Golf with a quick-charge plug-in, which would be paid off by her in a matter of months.

She’d been drawn to the look of the Tesla Model S, before the price made her face drain itself of all blood.

“Maybe once you’ve written some more songs, and the whole world has seen what you’re capable of,” Kostya had said, with a smile. Songs. Yeah, she could write some more. Keep this new job going.

Once she found a way to discard that stupid, Godforsaken graveyard in her head, that laced her dreams with poison.

To compound matters, Kostya Vasilev was supposed to be visiting her today, but she received a message saying that he couldn’t, that he had gotten himself wrapped up in something. This fed into her fears, into the anxiety that he would distance himself from her and abandon the relationship at a point. She wouldn’t even blame him if he did. He would tell her to not worry, that he would be there. He’d likely try it for a few years, until he turned gray and sad like Aidan, when the problems she had meant that things may never result in a normal, happy family.

Kostya acted happy and content with her now. She was happy and content with him. But could she put him through this?

Did he deserve this? Especially when something like this health issue had caused his former wife’s death.

Just like that, Elinor immediately felt ashamed of her feelings, her wayward emotions and her spiral into despair. He must have thought he was close to losing someone else close to him. He might not have said as much, and wore that calm, passive face when visiting her, to reassure her everything on his side was fine, even though she knew of the daily stresses his business created. When he placed the flowers on the side, she examined them, and wondered about their hidden meaning, because she knew flowers had a language of their own. No doubt someone like Kostya would seek meaning in flowers and in symbols – he enjoyed finding beauty in deeper words.

The dark green vase had in it several amaryllis, green with vibrant red petals, white chrysanthemums, gerbera daisies, gladioli, and a particular abundance of her favorite flower, heather – but colored white.

She had never seen white heather. She only remembered when reading about heather in a book once, how people used to pluck it from gorse bushes for luck, and how her mother, at Elinor’s persistence, had managed to procure purple heather for one of her birthdays, so she could tend to it in her room in a windowsill plant pot. The plant itself had grown well under her care.

He recalled me saying I liked heather. I should have probably told him it was purple, though. She sniffed at the flowers again, wanting their scent to transport her to a better place than the cold sterility of the hospital and the hard mattress underneath. The heather, at least, took her back to a better time.

Thoughts still swirling in confusion, the dull ache never quite disappearing, she drifted into a fitful sleep, bored and unwilling to do much else.

Sleep gave her the dreams, the ones she didn’t want. Waking didn’t help much with it either. When Elinor finally got discharged from hospital, almost two and a half weeks after she’d been rushed in, the pain having knocked her unconscious, the first thing she did was to go back to the apartment she still hadn’t given a month’s notice on, driven there by Andrew, in his new car, and Catrina, who wanted to help buy any raw fresh food she needed in her apartment. She took the hospital flowers with her as well, the ones that did not wilt, and put them on her table, in the tiny living room. Most of her belongings had been shifted over to the studio by now.

Catrina had been less than impressed to find out the amount of moldy food left in the fridge, and went on an aggressive trash mission, dumping almost all the contents of the fridge and freezer into black bags, and any empty containers of noodles that still lay about. Several things had new life forms growing merrily on them, and Catrina berated her only daughter as she stormed through the apartment like a whirlwind, with Andrew helping to make trips down and up to the dumpsters.

“A lot of this isn’t just three weeks’ worth of bad food, this is months’ worth. What on earth have you been doing with yourself all this time? Are you not getting paid enough? Are you sleeping over at that Kostya’s place or something instead? Because otherwise we might need to have some words about this, daughter-mine.”

Elinor felt too out of it and exhausted to deal with any excessive exposure to mothering right now, and she gave terse responses, not wanting to elaborate or make an anecdote of the reasons why she had chosen not to explain the whole situation with Kostya and the studio.