[MS] January

[deep_red_bells]

Lean on me, lean on me >> Give it a try, it won't hurt --You Am I – ‘Doug Sahm’


She’s been hiding. Not meaning to, per se, but shut up in the room that is not the room that she shares with the man downstairs but a guest bedroom, which is precisely what she feels like, a guest, a stranger passing through. She ducked into that bedroom, briefly, to look around, to rifle curiously through a few drawers. That was where she found the pictures.

Shoeboxes and albums full of them, all of perfect strangers, the strangest of all being the very face that looks back at her from the mirror, staring up at her through the gloss of photographs, smiling, happy. She scooped them up and rushed back to the guest room with them, curled up in the corner of the sparsely furnished room and gazed at each one almost greedily. Some of them are landmarks and places, but she tosses them back into the boxes impatiently, uncaring of some monument or casino or fountain. It's the faces and the smiles that she can't look away from, pieces of warmth that she clings to almost too tightly as though hoping she can absorb just the slightest bit. They’re split second snapshots of everything that she’s lost, but they’re tangible, they're something. They’re people that she knows. Friends. Acquaintances. Family, maybe. Some have names and dates or locations written on the back in a looping hand that she traces with her fingertips and wonders if it’s hers. Claire and Sylar, Christmas ‘08. Adam, Peter, Mohinder and Julian, Rockefeller Center. Rico & Me. Val and Hank outside of Caesar’s. Tucker and Church @ GAMESTOP posing w/ Master Chief.

It takes her a moment to identify the pangs in her chest as more than an aching sadness and confusion and longing. There’s hope there as well.

The sun’s setting by the time she creeps downstairs with the boxes and albums in her arms. She shouldn’t feel so guilty for sneaking around a house that’s supposed to be hers, but there’s still a bit of sheepishness in her expression, in the way she bites her lip and hesitates to even approach the man she’s told she’s to marry. She believes it now, though. That she loves him, even if she can’t find the emotion in her. She’s seen the way she smiles at him in those frozen snapshots of time, and the way he looks back at her.

“I found these,” she admits, which sounds better than ‘I went snooping,’ and she sets the boxes and albums down on the coffee table and withdraws the top stack, the ones that had jumped out at her the most, the brightest smiles, what seemed the happiest times. “Tell me about them,“ she requests, almost pleads as she hands him the stack, and for the first time since the lights went out in her mind, there’s something there besides a vacant confusion in her eyes.

There’s hope. Wild and uncertain, but hope, nonetheless.