(no subject)

It isn't terribly often now that Therese finds herself all caught up in the past. Back in her apartment, there's a photo album carefully tucked into a drawer containing some of the old pictures of hers that she found in her mail once, but she doesn't generally look at them. It's enough to know that they're there. Christmas and New Year's tend to be hard times of year, but then, they already tended to be anyway. Having been left by what little family she had left when she was a child, of course holidays largely about family would be difficult. It's been nearly five years, anyway — a staggering number when she stops to think about it, but time enough that brief trysts should no longer carry such weight for her.

Maybe it's something in the air, then, something to do with the changing seasons that has her wake up feeling slightly melancholy. Maybe it's just loneliness, so many of her friends gone now. She's more open here than she thought she would ever be able to be, and yet there's a whole chapter of her life — short but pivotal — that she never speaks about, kept close to her chest like a secret. It's an odd sort of nostalgia, really, not for something that was but for something that might have been, a feeling lovely and crisp and sad.

She considers focusing on work, the way she did back in New York, but that matter requires a different sort of thoughtfulness right now, her head spinning with things she isn't quite ready to consider. Besides, it's her day off, and she may as well enjoy it. Afternoon finds her at a bar near her building, a nice sort of place, similar to where she would have gone back home. Sitting at the bar, she orders herself a dry martini with an olive, subtly lifting her glass as if in a toast when the bartender turns away, fingers itching for a cigarette. After this, she thinks, she'll go outside for a few minutes to light one.