Romance In A Column

chapter nineteen,

    Existing without an axis is something Eryn Sallow only ever achieves when inebriated.

    Champagne sloshed over the rim of her cup as her laughter, a current that propelled the liquor into uneasy tides, rounded the domed glass. Foam sizzling as it dribbled down her chin unto the collar of her button up, she's severed from gravity.

    She can feel the rough texture of the sweater, once peach, it'd been washed until the cotton was gravelly against her skin. Brushing her tongue along her lips, to the roof her mouth clings the butter that'd peeled off the popcorn. A light show with the backdrop of her close lids, she's there again; the first time she felt alienated from the consequences of every event.

    They're something mildly terrifying about all which correlates to space, in Eryn's head.

    If she's to guide herself by the words of the kid with askew glasses who'd brushed her shoulder as he, on the balls of his feet, explained in animate hand gesture a theory he'd read online to a faceless friend in Eryn's memory.

    Time was a folded paper and, in some places, it was thin enough for centuries, decades, millenniums to brush. We call them ghosts, he'd gone on, but it is just two different bits of history unfolding simultaneously without hierarchy of present, past and future (—concurrence, Eryn would now know to call it).

    In which case, Eryn's ninth grade isn't a lifetime away, just an inner face of history, tucked under the curved ceiling of the planetarium near her high school; not yet worn to translucency, when she'll become a ghost.

    It was both comforting and haunting, that thought.

    She'd nibbled on the skin of her thumb until it bled, that day. Eryn hadn't ever felt more diminutive than then – boisterous boys shouldering one another, made her chest cave further into the slope of her spine to avoid the ripple that juddered through the crowd milling the exhibit. 

    Eryn learnt then: in space, there's no up and down. Today, her palms salty from the toasted kernels, alcohol fools her into believing, in her life, there isn't either.

    There's no up, no down, no true north or horizon; there's just now, and she's determined to hide in this fold of time until the reckoning comes.

    Because it's sweet, with Sabine's hip bumping into hers, ushering Eryn out of the kitchen while she assembles a cheese board ("you're too drunk to make it look pretty," she'd claimed).

    Because her mother's laughter, a foreign sound, Eryn – sluggish with champagne and wine – can't catch until it's faded from her mouth but can feel under her fingertips, a coat of dew on her apartment walls from which she'd torn off a god-awful wallpaper of gardenias once. Her feet had been crusted with the paint that'd gotten peeled along and Eryn had been too lazy to clean up because adulting was hard, and she finds it still is.

    So, she's determined to hide in this fold of time because she can; because, severed from gravity, Eryn is rotating without axis – alternatively, abysmally spiralling.

    "I'm exhausted," their mother begins, setting down her glass of wine. "Running around New York with you girls like I'm twenty wore me out, I'd say."

    "You don't look a day past twenty five, mom," Melina says. Earning a tired side-eye to which she snickers. "That guy in the skybar did ask if you were my sister."

    Sabine, smoothing her hands along her thighs, picks up the wine bottle – the neck, nestled between her breast; gripping between her fingers both hers and Melina's cups, she smiles. "We'll take it to the rooftop."