Kaylor: The Timeline

Chapter 16

April 16, 2014

Taylor had given up on falling back to sleep at around 6 AM, when she rolled out of bed and decided to treat herself to an early breakfast. Cooking always cleared her mind, offering a temporary reprieve from whatever worry she was being plagued with for the day. However, this morning it just didn’t seem to be working. She had overcooked her food, something she never did, probably from the severe lack of sleep she was running on.

Karlie never called last night, as was planned. Taylor had sat up late watching television, clutching her phone in her hand, as she kept convincing herself that any minute now, Karlie would call. The call never came, and when Taylor realized she had been watching late night infomercials for an hour she could no longer tell herself the call was coming. She reluctantly went to bed, where she lay awake in darkness for hours. The bed felt so unfamiliar to her; too large and too cold. It was a sensation she experienced her first few nights in the city after her move, but a sensation that went away immediately when Karlie began spending her nights beside her.

When Karlie left her apartment and said her goodbye, Taylor knew the night would be hard, but it was made even worse that she had to retire for the night without hearing from Karlie. She felt stood up, in a way, and she contemplated being the first to call Karlie. Maybe that was what the younger girl wanted? Was it a test? If it was, Taylor chose to fail it. She didn’t want to be the one to reach out and complicate Karlie’s life more than she already had. If Karlie didn’t want to speak to her, good for her, it was probably better for the model that way. But that didn’t mean it left Taylor with a feeling of rejection so searing that it made her feel short of breath.

So Taylor lay awake, playing back the entire day in her mind wondering if she should have done something different. When she analyzed that enough, she played back their entire friendship and wondered if there were things she should have done different in the past couple of months. At some point, the singer eventually drifted off to sleep.

Before the sun had even risen, Taylor was awake once more in darkness. She isn’t sure what woke her up. Meredith slept peacefully beside her, there couldn’t have been any abrupt noise to awaken her so suddenly. Maybe in her sleep she had been reaching for someone who wasn’t there, and her body told her something was wrong.

So she stared up at her ceiling in darkness, torturously analyzing everything once more. Why didn’t Karlie call? And so when the sun rose, so did Taylor. Cooking would help with everything, right? It always did.

But as Taylor sat with burnt pancakes in front of her at her kitchen table, awake before life began in the city for the day, she has never felt so isolated. She has never felt so alone.

And so Taylor pushes away her ruined breakfast and lays her head on the table as she is overcome with sobs, crying before the rest of the world is even awake.

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Karlie is painfully awake when her red eye flight to LA touches down before the sun has even risen on the west coast. It hadn’t been cheap, purchasing flight tickets so last minute and at such a late hour but she decided to splurge.

Karlie hadn’t known what to do when she got back to her own apartment after leaving Taylor’s. She was surrounded by pictures of her and Taylor in her home, and the pictures weren’t giving her the feelings of joy and warmth they usually did. She felt trapped by them, ambushed even. And then her manager began to call, probably catching word that Karlie had unprofessionally skipped out on a scheduled work out and fitting. She hadn’t answered. She didn’t have an explanation for her manager and she felt guilty enough as it was by letting people down and wasting their time. Karlie didn’t want to hear about it from her manager too. She knew how detrimental it could be for a model’s career to have a reputation of being unreliable. The most appealing option at this point was to shut her phone off and avoid responsibilities for a while longer, but that definitely wasn’t the best option. So as the phone lay abandoned on her kitchen counter, Karlie’s thoughts turned to Josh.