The Seams Have Splintered, Too.

Episode 8.

[TW: contains subtle references to substance abuse and DA/DV]

It was like there was a heart that beat between herself and him, begging her to draw in nearer, to protect it, protect them, although she hardly felt it belonged to either one of them anymore.

Those people who did own it were long gone – ghosts of an imagined era.

At present, there was only him, and her. Familiar strangers… pining past each other.

After the fight, the first snow came, and stayed.

She spent her time gazing out at the balcony from inside the house those days. The weather was too cold to step out onto it for long, so she just hovered, daily, leaning by the window on its door, forehead clean against the glass, her whole mind wanting.

Sometimes she’d stare outside until the sky ceded the day, until her legs began to buckle out beneath her.

Then he’d come home.

He announced her evening's ending with the slamming of a door. She braced in waiting, scooping at each dwindling trace of silence left for her before the lights burst on, reflecting back her face caged in their bedroom.

“Jesus. You act deranged these days, you know that?”

No longer finding warmth inside his arms, she held Kombucha on the couch.

He found it cute, at first.

“My two best girls, getting so close.”

But when Kombucha didn’t take to him the same he grew resentful, complained about some hives he never scratched, a daily runny nose he never blew…

“You know, Pat said she’d take her…”

She didn’t know what to do but cling much closer, those sweet eyes sanctuary from the echoes of the world he brought back home, a world that only gave her place in cleaning up the mess it dropped below itself.

She’d learnt to read the wreckage like a code.

Come winter’s solar start, one message was deciphered: his big deals haven’t closed.

Of course, he didn’t tell her, but she knew – knew in the whiskey on his breath, the bloodshot eyes, “from allergies” he said, the way he jerked and raged about at night, blurting a wild idea at her each minute…

“Let’s go to Italy! Get you all nice and gold for me…”

The whiff of their financial ruin came to her in the desperate way he loved her – not love at all now, but distraction, an obsession, eyeing her like she wasn’t even there, just a reflection of possession. He consumed her, hard and reckless, just like his liquor, just like his lines.

She fell to bed empty and drained each night.

He didn’t notice.

Meanwhile, her own career banked on a lottery in silence. No online application won response, not even rejection. She supposed the robots reading them eschewed her on the grounds of her dismissal. She supposed they thought that she’d done wrong to him, her “supervisor,” the unchecked box conceding “contact him” no doubt warning their systems – don’t employ her.

She practiced sewing.

Because all she had was time – time in his presence, time in his absence, time to regret unrealized futures flung now far beyond her sight, though she could taste them, still, in flavors honey-sweet upon the tongue, moments of another life where her hands sewed the seams that held her story.

“What have I done?” she asked the shadowed yard one night. She realized that the thought was double-sided.

“Have I done nothing?”

An urge to act inspired her blood at once. She planned to leave him – slipping in secret to her laptop any night he fell asleep too hard to hear her.

The escapades forged memorable hours. She was awake, at last, so so awake, even inside the darkest rooms, she flickered, kindled by the weight of Kombucha snuggled warm and soft beside her, her spine pressed trustingly against her thigh.

“My love, we’re gonna make it,” she whispered fondly, sinking lips into her fur.

It took some trying, but sure enough, one day somebody wrote her back that they could help her. She was a colleague, they’d shared a class or two in college, but despite their mere acquaintance-ship she offered them a home that they could hide in.

As long as you need to.

The words brought tears into her eyes. She wrote her back, so grateful.

They decided on a time.

And so to action, careful planning – it took a week or two to strategize her fleeing, but she grabbed the thrill of exit nonetheless.

And yet…

And yet she almost missed him.

On the morning of her preconceived departure, she woke and stared down at his face, heart clenching at the sight of his eyelashes, pillow marks… that softness that his waking self betrayed. She could have cried right then and there knowing his panic, feeling his fear at her removal from his life. The life they shared.

But then he woke and frowned and squinted.

“You in the mood, or making breakfast?”

The final good-bye came easier than expected. A simple kiss and he was out the door.

She ran upstairs as soon as it had closed.

The packing was quick, she finished in under an hour, and then she showered – one last long, luxurious bathe before the hard part: moving forward.

He was waiting in the bedroom when she emerged, though.

Around him, all her bags were strewn and emptied, Kombucha barked outside the balcony door…

He had her laptop in his hands, pacing the floor.

She had a robe, a phone, a hairbrush… nothing more.

At first, he stood there, reading.

She grabbed her wallet and her keys… reached for the clothes laid underneath them on the dresser…

And then the screaming…

She ran.

Outside, outside! To where Kombucha had been thrown, not fully thinking through what she had done until he followed… and she jumped – down to a lucky layer of snow, the bushes blessing to her bones – she kept on running.

Her friend – a miracle! – was busy parking just outside their home.

She leapt in swiftly, bare feet clumsy, numb.

“He's coming! Go!”

They sped off, swerving – out of the suburbs, onto the highway, into the city, driving erratic, paranoid, and twisted routes.

They stayed at a hotel later that night, as a precaution. Though she’d erased all names from emails, he knew policemen, and they both feared they still might find them.

Or he'd find her, even with tracking off her phone. So they waited, hyper-vigilant, for sirens, sounds or cars that seemed suspicious.

Still, she was free now, more than ever. Her friend bought clothes and food and wine to celebrate her newfound liberation.

Kind as it was, though, her heart remained tormented, one sole thought upon her mind:

Kombucha, her sweet girl, was left behind.