Fiction and Hollywood Heartbreak

Fabian had teased her gently about the tear tracks on her face, more evident in the clearer light outside the cinema. And he hadn't meant it maliciously, but the teasing put Dorcas in an ill mood. She hadn't quite snapped at him, hadn't said anything unkind, but she didn't hold his hand on the walk back to their flat and the kiss goodnight was just a habit. She remembers—and regrets—that. It's not like it was the end, the last, but it was a night she went to bed angry and it feels just wasted, and she'd had so few.

Dorcas can't remember the film that made her cry, not at all. She just remembers the feeling, sitting there beside Fabian, stiff in her chair in the darkened cinema, choking. It felt so public; even in the dark, everyone was watching and judging, everyone could see. And all Dorcas wanted to do was smash her swollen face into Fabian's shoulder and bawl out all the bottled up sobs rising up in her lungs, to cry irrational, useless tears over fiction and Hollywood heartbreak. But it was public and unworthy, and so she choked in the dark, refusing to even reach over for Fabian's hand. She remembers that, remembers the way the tears managed to well out over the dam in her chest and roll down her face, how she itched so badly to swipe at the tight, uncomfortable trails they left behind. But pride kept her spine straight and hands at her sides, swung her hair over her shoulder so Fabian couldn't see.

She remembers how stupidly furious she was with herself, how scornful she was of this weakness. Proud, collected Dorcas Meadowes was breaking her heart over muggle fairytales when she couldn't even cry at funerals any longer.

She remembers that awful feeling vividly, of trying to hold herself together in the dark, of how those two scant hours felt like an eternity.

She remembers, because that is her life without Fabian, and there is no blinding light outside the theatre to walk into, no end in sight.

Even after the curtain is supposed to have fallen on her grief, when everyone around her has moved on to mourning the next tragedy, she is still choking without him.