Getting up was a difficult feat. Her head hurt, her vision blurred, and her jaw ached. She remembered quite a bit from the evening before, but none of it was a fond memory. She dropped her feet to the floor, allowing their bareness to touch the coldness of the stone floor. She shivered, but did not place them within the confines of slippers.
Remarking upon the events of the night previous, the woman exited her bedroom and made her way to the larger room which housed her study and the kitchen/dining area. She moved toward the window near the kitchen, looking outside at the back of the house. Behind the house was a stream of flowing water, the source of which was just behind the cattails which obscured her house from her other neighbors. Often she would go and sink her feet into the water, allowing them to swish over and over, until she made little splashes. It was rewarding in its way. Little pleasures.
She scratched the side of her neck as she watched the birds dive in and out near the water, and winced. The scratches she had received from before were fading, but it was not wise to allow her nails to graze it still. She sighed.
She had made headway in attempting to rid herself of her feelings for the man, the physician. Indeed, she remarked, when she had released herself from visiting or seeing him at all, she barely knew of his existence, and rarely ever thought of him, after a time. But she made the mistake of visiting him again, after having had a dream about him when she was in the Lone-lands with the two others. And he had played upon her feelings of guilt, had suggested to her that she had taken "displeasure" in his presence.
As she stood by the window, she thought of the oath she had made to the man, that she would no longer avoid his company, and that she would not backtrack from that. She turned it over in her mind, frowning. But she had made her bed, and now she must lie in it, mustn't she?
She considered herself, then, taking her bare feet toward the table in the study. She sat at the table, rifling through books and notes, books and notes. She was afraid of everything, it would seem,but most of all, she was afraid of herself. She kept herself so bottled, so repressed. She wondered sometimes, as she wondered now, when would it burst? When would she finally do something that she would regret?
She thought again of the night previous, of the way she had tried to comfort the woman who had hurt her before, the one to whom she felt an almost motherly bond, though they were not overly disparate in age. She had seen that woman in the tail end of a fit of drunken rage and despair. She wondered at the cause, but would not get an answer out of the physician or the keen-eyed woman. She remembered holding the pot for the first woman to use for retching, and how she had cleaned up after her, though she was herself not quite sober.
When the drunk woman had passed out asleep, she spoke with the keen-eyed woman for a time, and found herself wanting to run. The woman knew things about her without her having to say, and that bothered her. It was not long before she was running again. She had had an entire bottle of wine before coming there, and when she came home, she found herself drinking almost frantically again.
She did not drink often, but when she did, she drank heavily. It was one of the few things that eased what she had tried so long to suppress, everything. She often felt as though she were bound by a tightly laced corset, and it shortened her breath with its cinching of her waist. Today she felt the same way, and she longed to scream. But even in the privacy of her own home, she felt that she could not do such a thing. It would be improper, and how would she be seen?
Instead, she rubbed her temples and made a tea of willow bark. It would help the self-inflicted suffering of her body, but would do little to ease her mind. Once more she fixated on the notion of the bottle breaking, of the corset coming undone, of the great explosion that might occur from within her.
As the kettle whistled, she thought of the steam rising from within, threatening to burst, threatening to cause her to sing. She tried to tamp it down. She feared it, she feared herself. Of all the abominable things, she was the worst. And if it were not she herself, it was her emotions, her feelings, her desires.
She poured the water and let it steep. If they knew, if she was truthful, if she was frank...but they would never know. Certainly he would never know.
She sank down into the chair at her empty dining room table. She would keep it all bottled. A tempest, she mused to herself, in a teacup.
