Like anywhere this place has its rhythm. OA tries to find the lulls when she chooses to slip out to breathe the city in. Even now, in relative stillness, life goes on around her which is precisely what she needs. Life, lives being lived alongside and around her, all but heedless of her as she stands here leaning gently against a wall. Individual, self-contained worlds spiral out in impossibly complex patterns the same way they had before her and will continue to do after her. It's comforting, even if she mourns her place in it.
These are not, however, the primary things OA feels when someone slips up next to her and slides their hand into hers. The first of it is fear, a reflexive, helpless panic, washing over her like a wave -- she jolts, pulling against the grip on her hand. Her head snaps to the side, lips parted around a sharp inhalation. There's anger, rushing up on the crest of that wave of fear, and then... and then both ebb. Her heart still pounds in her chest, she still wants to pull her hand free, but that flow of emotion she can't place as her own says enough. This is another of the lost.
She takes a deep, steadying breath, fighting against how shocking, how incomprehensible the touch of another person's skin still is. She gropes for equilibrium, turning her head to look back out at the street. Impossible to slip back into reverie now, but she can try for calm. She feels, at once, connected and cut adrift. The intimacy of the moment is too vast to contain: she feels the most intense relief and the deepest ache. For which of them she hurts most is unclear.
Slowly, the tension in her arm slackens, her fingers curling loosely around River's hand. Is it easier because this girl is a stranger, or harder?
"It's wonderful, isn't it?" she murmurs. OA says wonderful and means it, but she means it in its rawest sense, wonderful as in full of wonder and wonder as in a tumultuous upset of the soul, the way awesome can mean terrifying.
001
These are not, however, the primary things OA feels when someone slips up next to her and slides their hand into hers. The first of it is fear, a reflexive, helpless panic, washing over her like a wave -- she jolts, pulling against the grip on her hand. Her head snaps to the side, lips parted around a sharp inhalation. There's anger, rushing up on the crest of that wave of fear, and then... and then both ebb. Her heart still pounds in her chest, she still wants to pull her hand free, but that flow of emotion she can't place as her own says enough. This is another of the lost.
She takes a deep, steadying breath, fighting against how shocking, how incomprehensible the touch of another person's skin still is. She gropes for equilibrium, turning her head to look back out at the street. Impossible to slip back into reverie now, but she can try for calm. She feels, at once, connected and cut adrift. The intimacy of the moment is too vast to contain: she feels the most intense relief and the deepest ache. For which of them she hurts most is unclear.
Slowly, the tension in her arm slackens, her fingers curling loosely around River's hand. Is it easier because this girl is a stranger, or harder?
"It's wonderful, isn't it?" she murmurs. OA says wonderful and means it, but she means it in its rawest sense, wonderful as in full of wonder and wonder as in a tumultuous upset of the soul, the way awesome can mean terrifying.