lonely
note: i've been doing a collection of one phrase and one word prompts under a time limit.
written under time restraint. i didn't finish though, which is the break.
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pairing: shikatema
rating: T
prompt: lonely/hanging from a cliff
Between traffic lights and steaming coffee and collard shirts and ink stains she isn't lonely. She isn't lonely. With smiles and flashing lights and long words with easy meanings and arrogance and used condoms and sore backs, she isn't lonely.
She can still walk into her usual coffee shop without her bodyguards and she can sit down in the corner and feel ceramic against her bottom lip. She isn't empty and she isn't broken.
But she feels little else beside the china on her skin and his eyes when he looks at her (though she is usually the one looking at him).
Her belt around her waist pushes into her form, digging lines that only fade during the night before being reprinted during the day and she fixes her hair in the morning and is told to put ice beneath her eyes to push the blood away from the swell and has a special light color to swipe on to make her alive and bright and most days she falls asleep in the makeup chair with her head held high as people surround her touching and painting and she recognizes her made up self more than her bare self more and more.
She isn't lonely though. She isn't hanging from some cliff waiting for a hand to reach out. She is balanced on high heeled shoes and with colored lips. A kaleidoscope of beauty and mystery and seduction and intelligence and she is the woman who can do everything but everything is less than All.
She never asked for this.
She is a daughter first. A sister second.
But what is blood in front of cameras? Family ties mean nothing between drafts of bills and laws and oak-tree schools and fluctuations of languages.
She never had a choice. But it's no matter because she never had a chance.
Government is a fancy word to describe a lost structure. Celebrity is her career and Image is her maintenance.
But she isn't lonely.
She knows he thinks so though. She can always tell. He looks at her and sees Her, not the person she is presented in front of him as. It isn't like they've been friends before. Or he has seen her for years. She comes in some nights and sits down and he brings her coffee and tells her that she looks tired. But the bruises are hidden beneath her eyes and she is easily presentable as ever, but he closes the blinds and shrugs away her indignation and sits by the counter and does the crossword.
The world speeds on and gasoline ingrains itself in tar and she comes and sits and sometimes forgets to touch her coffee but by the time she wakes up the place is clean and he is offering a hand even if there was never any cliff she stumbled off. (or maybe she was holding on too tightly to notice her slipping feet).
Temari isn't lonely as months move on and she forgets the date even as she recites it. Temari isn't lonely when the shutters click and she decides not to look back though she is sure his dark eyes aren't watching her leave the shop, though most nights she wishes they were. She isn't lonely when she crawls into an empty bed without a partner and wishes her degrees and fame could give her the skill set to produce the words to invite him in, but she has never shared a bed outside a hotel and she is sure he'd say no (even though she sleeps better when he is there). Temari isn't lonely every night she
leaves him.
Between traffic lights and steaming coffee and collard shirts and ink stains she isn't lonely. She isn't lonely.