An Embrace A Tombstone Could Never Give||Mercedes Jones
Tagged: Mercedes Jones mentions of Sam Evans
When/Where: NY cemetery, Sunday morning
Notes: Mercedes, a week after the events in D.C, visits her father's grave.
“Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I'm gazing at a distant star.
It's dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago.
Maybe the star doesn't even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.”
― Haruki Murakami
But it still hurt.
It hurt like hell.
She had given her body, and in that sense, her heart, to Sam. She thought that night she was going down a different path. A return to innocence through love. Dwight and Jesse be damned, she had thought she could block out all the shit of the world through her feelings for this one boy… She let her heart do the talking… and she had suffered for it- greatly. The universe had it’s ways of bitch slapping her, and it had been doing that since the day her father died.
That’s why she found herself here, at her father’s graves on this dreary Sunday morning. Church had long ago stopped being her thing. This was where she confessed. This was where she asked for forgiveness from the only place it counted.
Because she had failed him. Failed her father… herself… lost sight of her own survival for a few stolen moments of…love? Or had she lost her way when she convinced herself she could play the devious games that men of this world do- only to be used and spit back out. She was pawn in a bigger game of chess, and she hadn’t really realized it until that night she took that walk of shame after Sam slammed the door in her face. For so long she thought she was in control, but the breaking of her heart just showed that she had never been in control. Only out of sorts, and out of her mind, to think that she could truly change anything. It was solidified that night that she was tarnished. Thrown out like trash.
It spread through the student body like wildfire.
She had mostly stayed in her dorm, and off the internet, for days. Just going to class, sitting in the back, and leaving out quickly. Jesse, that bastard, had been calling, but she wasn’t trying to talk to him. She’d be fine if she never talked to him again. She knew the looks and the whispers all too well of the student body, and they had risen considerably since that weekend. It would die down soon, like gossip always did, but the damage was done.
She had gambled, and she had lost.
“I earned my place there in Wentworth. By the book, and not by the book,” she began bitterly. "I’m not going to let them run me off… I just… things can never be the way they were. I…can’t be the way I was,” she whispered, letting out a shaky breath. She was on the brink of crying again, and she hated it. She hadn’t shed this many tears since her father’s funeral. Then again, it did feel like something had died that night in D.C… She closed her eyes, trying to focus on the love for her father, over the love for a certain green eyed boy, that now held nothing but contempt for her… and that was fine, right? That’s the way these things went. Life was fucked up like that…
She sunk down to the grass, her knees giving out on her under the immense sadness weighing on her shoulders. “I’m sorry, Daddy,” she whispered brokenly. It was moments like these she didn’t care about her designer jeans or fancy shoes. She just longed for her father’s embrace, but always had to settle for the cold feeling of the dirt at his final resting place instead. “I tried,” she went on. “I tried to get the files… but they came at such a high price… and I- I lost anyway,” she went on, her fingers touching the tombstone as tears began to cloud her vision. “I thought… I thought I had fallen… thought I had finally found something real again… but I was stupid. Maybe I’ve been stupid for years now.Trying to be something I’m not. Trying to play this Upper Eastside game…even though I know everyone looks at me like I don’t belong… Maybe it’s just what I needed. To finally fall so low that I-,” her voice broke off as she thought about the adoration that shown in Sam’s eyes, before the dark image of his fury when he threw her clothes out into the hallway came into her mind.
“It hurts, Daddy,” she sobbed. “Why does everything always hurt? I used to be able to go to you after a bad day at school and you’d make everything better. You were always so smart… so knowing… Why didn’t you tell me that the world was cruel? That it would take you away from me?! That I’d be left here, trying to fend for myself… getting my heart broken,” she sobbed harder, tears clouding her vision, as anger and sadness colored her tone. “I just feel so… alone,” she finished, as she found herself now hugging the tombstone, imagining the strong embrace of her father, that seemed to make everything seem a lot less bleak.
But the embrace never came.
No one would be hugging her, and telling her it would be alright. They never did.
It would be a lie anyway… like most things in this world. She’d just have to live with the lie..and survive… on her own… like she had been doing for years now. There was no going back.
'You know how looking over the edge of a rooftop makes your head spin? It's a bit similar. I liked going up on the roof at school, and I'd look down and think "If I fell, I'd die, wouldn't I?" Death seemed very close, and it made me shiver. It's the same looking at those models. It doesn't seem to be the model I'm afraid of, but myself. Because I become one of the dead... One sees with the eyes of the dead, you know, when one looks down at a model. There's a nostalgia there, too, and an enchantment...'
