ARIA'S pov
I have been functional for three days.
That is the word I keep using in my head. Functional. I answered emails and attended artist check-in’s. Vincent's hovering managed with the particular kind of deflection I have spent this year learning. Vincent knows I am not fine. I know he knows but neither of us says it out loud because I have another show lined up in eighteen days and there is work to do. Falling apart is not one of them. I can schedule that for later.
I come home at six and the apartment stops me in the doorway.
Not because anything is wrong with it but because everything is exactly the same as I left it this morning and still it feels completely different. That silence, not peaceful but an absent one. The kind that has a shape to it because something used to fill
