Elephants

The water is grey this early, a calm unbroken expanse of shades. Breath puffing white on the cool air, she huddled deeper into the wool blanket wrapped around her shoulders, the red of her car the only color in a monotone world. In the poor light she can almost imagine monsters swirling in the deep, peering out where sea met sky and smiling, harmless with sharp teeth and gaping mouths. Were they there to swallow her dreams?

But maybe it’s just the alcohol still humming in her veins, warming her blood and dulling the chill seeping through wool socks and worn jeans. Another year gone. A good year. A fantastic year. And yet the melancholy slips in regardless, like the devil with his pretty lies, whispering half truths and twisted reality. Not good enough, didn’t try hard enough.

They were oddly easy to believe in under the half light where night meets dawn meets day. She’s there alone, has been all night, with only a thermos of coffee spiced with alcohol to keep her company. No one else wanted to venture out to meet the New Year with runny noses and dreams of deserving. She smiles wryly at the thought, running fingers through chilled hair, slicking it back, giant worries and scintillating dreams lumbering through her skull, loud like elephants in her ears, stomping and trumpeting everything she hadn't completed to the world.

Ridiculous thoughts in a tired addled mind.

Crunch, tires on gravel distract her from lonely gloom, so unlike her usual chipper self, before the slam of doors, one two, reach her ears and voices drift through the inky sky. “How do you even know she's going to be here?” she knows the voice and hearing it is enough to make lips twitch.

“Its New Year's morning, where the he else would she be,” She knows that voice too, this one even better. After all, she is intimately knowledgeable about the curve of pierced flesh the words tumble out of. Sitting still, she feels the sorrow tugging on her heart slowly start to slip. Either she was that predictable or just known that well, either way its comforting to hear.

Seconds tick-tock, matching heavy steps on stone and sand until the voices drift closer and he can hear the words, smug and haughty, “See, I told you.”

“Whatever.”

“Shove over punk,” a hand presses against her thigh, ringed and warm and she obediently shifts to the side, making room for her two guests on the hood of her car. “We’ve come to ruin the pity party,” Warm lips meet her cold ones in a kiss, tracings of a tongue, and the rest of the heaviness in her bones seems to float away.

A snort of semi-disgust reaches his ear and she grins, “I don’t think we have approval.”

“He,” the lips mumble against hers, “is just jealous.”

“I’m right here, and you never mentioned trading spit in your list of things to do when we found her,” the words were dry with only a hint of chastisement coloring the consonants and vowels.

Laughing, the other pulled away and made himself comfortable, just as the first streaks of gold tipped over the horizon. “What are you so afraid of? You won’t get cooties and whatever happened to ‘Whatever I want’?”

“It’s whatever I want, not you,” the retort was made through chapped lips and the car dipped even lower with added weight. “It’s bloody freezing out here.”

With a smile, tugging at her mouth and worming its way into her heart, she handed her thermos over. “Drink this,” she urged as an arm snuck around her waist and she let her head fall against a soft shoulder. Her regrets were sifting from her skull to tumble with the rocks on the shore, getting washed away in the light of friendship, lovers, and dawn.

Suddenly it didn’t feel so dark, the past so dreary. The year ahead was bright gold and the elephants, loud and obnoxious in her ears, could shut up.


A/N: Anyone have any regrets from the old year as we approach the new one?