It began as a shock, but time was never really of consequence to her so she let it pass. While it stung at first – the implication that it was somehow her fault, her doing, was not easily dispelled – it only lasted a short time and she had made it through the first month without issue. No one suspected anything to be amiss, in fact, she even felt a little lighter, just a little, like something had been lifted from her. It wasn't as if she saw him all the time, so what was seven days? Fourteen, thirty, another month? Times were busy those first two months, her attention always filled with something or other. She lived a year in the West Indes in a week, and spent time at a research facility in Antarctica; she had stories she wanted to tell like she'd never had before.
The third month was empty, but the strangest thing about empty is that it doesn't hurt, doesn't bite, doesn't sting. Empty numbs, so she didn't feel a thing, staring out her bedroom window and wondering if this was the real reason behind the separation. Something like this should be heavy, or be painful, but she didn't feel either of those things. Just that inexplicable lack of weight. Month four, five and six were hectic, seven a blur, eight a disaster and nine, she couldn't even remember. Andrew would apologize, looking distressed; but for what, she would never know. (A nagging feeling in the back of her mind would mock her weakness, but it made no sense)
Ten was the scale finally tipping. Michelle asked, curious and concerned, but she didn't miss a beat in telling her in the simplest words that it was a break. Michelle seemed less at ease. Taylor was satisfied, which annoyed her, but no more. Should it have been more? She still didn't know what to feel, so she picked and chose an adventure. Eleven was unpleasant, for the most part, and twelve finally brought the happy conclusion. She jumped and spun, ready and eager to tell her newest story but was met with empty air in response where she'd been expecting something, someone, else. A year, twelve months, without so much as a word, direct or indirect, and she felt she should be scared but it was too empty to allow that, far too empty to allow, so she contented herself otherwise.
A few days after twelve, she broke down. She was tired, confused, frustrated and distressed all at once and it didn't make sense because through it all she still plainly labelled everything as empty. One whole year without any sign of returning and finally, finally, it struck her that you can only be empty if there's a space needing to be filled. It wasn't space for her, gone unattended and untreated, it became a gaping void like the one she'd always feared would swallow her up since her first jump. She'd evidently made a misstep, fallen off the edge into something too dark and too deep to comprehend, tumbling into spaces she would never have considered existing before now. She sometimes had enough coherency to wonder why her mother was standing vigil at the door, stance like that of a woman in helpless mourning.
Two days later she picked up the pieces of herself and put them back together enough to crawl back to the surface of her consciousness and realize there had been something of her before all this. If now she was faced with having this void, she would find a way to fill it. Somehow she'd missed another month, falling in and out of the black. She launched herself into other passions, she did more jobs than she would normally take on, and she applied for the nearest University. She buried the memory of the hole in herself and slowly, slowly, began to forget it. It didn't pain her again, eased by a balm that waited patiently for when it would be properly complete.
Three months into her program, it all collapsed in on her again. Time took her everywhere and anywhere, to oriental streets decades in the past, small shop windows through which she could watch his ghost float past the glass without sparing her even a glance. Very nearly choking on the remains of all her feelings, she disappeared from there as quickly as possible. The skin was barely stretched over the wound, a thin membrane pulled taut by hope being the only thing keeping her from falling again into black. Everything she needed and wanted had just passed her by, but she was nothing to him at all, not even a wisp of a memory, just nothing. And it hurt more than she could have ever anticipated.
Later came anger. Anger at herself for clinging to something that was so obviously over - not a word in more than a year and not even a peep in almost two - but mostly anger with him. A year had been more than enough to break her (it seemed like that was the point of his 'break') but two was ridiculously cruel. Some finality wasn't too much to ask for, he could at least come out of whatever hiding place he'd adopted and let her know there was no going back so the wondering and waiting didn't tear her further apart. She let this rage and this fire burn and boil in the pit of her stomach, but it wasn't enough to smother hope, which refused to let her consider the possibility that he couldn't ever tell her. Her solution was to avoid the orient within the last two centuries entirely, desperately counting on "out of sight, out of mind", which had offered her temporary reprieves over the last two years.
Instead, she realized with horror, he would fill in the empty spaces of her vision, sometimes commandeering unoccupied places in her mind. What she wanted to escape in her waking hours didn’t let her escape even in sleep. She would awake from the gentlest of dreams, gasp as warmth gave way to an icy feeling of solitude and curl onto her side trying to hide from the recollections. At times, it made it impossible her to focus on her work or her studies, other times it just made everything inconceivably difficult. She found the anger returning, trying to mold itself into hatred, but it always turned back on her; she would loathe herself for even starting to hate him. It wasn't his fault. Her own brain just wouldn't leave well enough alone.
Halfway through the third set of twelve, she was so embroiled in the second year of her studies, she didn't have a spare thought to offer even in his memory. She had the fortune to lose herself in her peers; the natural ambient light she was said to exude disguising the hole she bore in her chest, and she was an attractive feature on campus, according to rumor. For a while she was safe, unaffected, but all her suitors began facing unjust comparisons to him that she regretfully didn't have any control over. They were analyzed, broken down, picked apart and measured up to a standard she liked to think she was completely romanticizing. No matter if it was romanticized or not, her heart, her void, just wouldn't be satisfied.
The end of the third year brought the end of hope.
