Today Feels—

“Amelia!” the barista yells over the bustling of caffeine-deprived New Yorkers. Before I can offer a proper “Thank you” to the girl behind the counter she has already turned her back to prepare the next order. Expecting the sugary taste of vanilla cream like I had ordered, plain, bitter coffee hits my tongue. I look back at the barista feverishly making drinks and take another sip, this time tasting slightly better than the first. I sit back down to my seat where I left the leather-bound journal sitting open on the table. The words “Today feels—” stare back at me as I hover my pen over the paper. I don’t understand why Dr. Montgomery thinks this writing prompt will help. It just feels like any other Sunday afternoon to me. Just as I’m about to finish the sentence with “—like yesterday”, there’s a squeal in the doorway.

“Amelia!” 

A woman in a red trench coat walks towards me with her arms outstretched.

“Kandace?” I laugh in disbelief as I stand for an embrace. 

“Isn’t this a small world?” she says with a wide smile, exposing her perfectly straight white teeth. “I can’t believe I’m running into you.”

“I can’t either. Aren’t you still living back in Virginia?”

“Not anymore. I just moved here a couple days ago.” 

“How exciting! Where in New York?”

She gives a sheepish laugh as she admits, “I don’t really have a place, yet. I left kind of on a whim.”

Hearing that from her doesn’t surprise me. Kandace made every decision on a whim back in college, like dying her hair different colors when she got bored, getting a new meaningless tattoo every month, sleeping with half the Theta Chi fraternity, and even her trip to Mexico with her ex. Everything Kandace does seems to be on a whim. 

            Kandace sits down at the table and leans forward. “Actually, I’m really glad I ran into you today. My friend just called me saying she needs me out of her place in the next few days because her landlord found out I’ve been staying there. Is there any chance I could crash at your place for a few nights?”

            I take a moment to process the question. “Um,” I say, “sure, I guess you could stay on my couch for a night or two.”

            She smiles and claps her hands together. “Oh yay! It’ll be like college all over again. Minus Sydney, of course.”

            Hearing her name said so casually in public, even after all this time, makes my heart race. Uttering it in the safety of Dr. Montgomery’s office is hard enough, but hearing it in open air where it’s whisked away and forgotten about in two seconds makes my stomach turn. I desperately want to clutch at the air, to clasp my hands around her name and bring it close to my chest. I ignore the urge to do so, but I can feel my face going white. The noises around me are suddenly getting louder, and the smell of coffee starts to suffocate me. “Yeah,” I try to say, but it barely comes out in a whisper. 

            “Well, do you want to show me your place?” Kandace asks as she takes a swig of my coffee. “Oh, gross. Plain coffee? Nasty. You should take it back.”

            “Yeah, I can show you my apartment. It’s only a couple blocks away,” I say as I stand a bit too quickly, anxious to leave the walls that are slowly closing in. She doesn’t seem to notice as she springs up from her chair and heads for the door.

            “Wow, this place is, um, nice,” Kandace says as she walks through the door into my one-bedroom apartment. 

            “I hope you weren’t expecting much. It’s not like I’m swimming in cash at the moment,” I say.

            She’s obviously unimpressed by the looks of the space. “Aren’t you like a lawyer, though?”

            “Paralegal.”

            “Oh.”

            She takes a few steps into the apartment and into the living room. To an outsider, the beige walls and cheap, broken-in furniture may seem dreary, but the slight scent of vanilla in the air, the soft shag carpet under my toes, and the sagging couch nestled in the corner with blankets laying untidily across the cushions invite me into my own safe, comfortable world. 

After a quick look around the room, Kandace turns to me and says, “So, where’s the booze?”

I laugh. “It’s 2 o’clock in the afternoon.”

“Who cares? You used to start drinking at the crack of dawn six years ago. Where’d that Amelia go?” 

“She realized there’s better things to do than get wasted all day.”

“So, sitting around all day sober is better?”

I sigh. “To be honest, I don’t even have any alcohol in the apartment.”

Kandace’s mouth drops open in surprise. “Well then,” she says as she walks back over to the door and grabs her purse, “I will be back.”

After about five hours Kandace still isn’t back. She probably just went back to her friend’s place to grab her stuff, but how much is she bringing over? This flat is barely big enough for all of my shit let alone whatever the hell she’s bringing. I’m starting to regret letting her stay over. Who knows how long she’ll stay? Finally, there’s a knock on the door. I open it to see Kandace leaning against the wall for stability with a bottle of wine in her hands.

She holds up the bottle and says, “There you go. Got you some booze for your place. Now we can party.”

“Where did you go?” I ask, taking it from her hands.

“The liquor store.” 

“And got drunk there?”

“I might have stopped by a bar on the way,” she giggles. She staggers over to the couch and pats the cushion next to her. 

I put the bottle down on the kitchen table and sit down. “What is it?”

“How are you? I miss you.”

“I’ve missed you, too,” I say with a small laugh. “How are you?”

Her face goes cold. “I’m sad that Sydney’s not here.”

I take a deep breath and close my eyes. “I wish she was here, too,” I say quietly. This time her name floats through the room, safe from anything that might disturb it.  

“Remember when we’d play monopoly on Saturday nights when there were no parties to go to?”

“Yeah, I do. You would always run out of money in the first thirty minutes trying to buy up everything you’d land on.”

“Better strategy than Sydney’s! She’d always let me keep my change. So stupid.”

“Because you hardly had any money left at the start of the game! She just wanted to keep playing with everyone.”

“Well, that’s why she never won.”

“I don’t really think she cared about winning as much as you do.”

Kandace turns her head towards the T.V. for a minute before turning back toward me. Her eyes, usually alive with color and spirit, are now gray and cloudy. For a moment, I don’t recognize her. 

“Kandace, are you okay?” I ask.

“It wasn’t my fault,” she says in a whisper.

I can feel my face go white again. “I know that. No one blames you,” I say as I touch her arm in an attempt of comfort. I’m not sure if I remember how to properly comfort another person anymore. People usually feel the need to comfort me, not vice versa. 

She flinches at my touch. “That’s because they blame you,” she says through gritted teeth, tears now welling in her hazy eyes. 

My breaths become short and staggered. My brain is replaced with fuzz as I try to retain composure. “What are you talking about? I wasn’t driving.”

 “No one else wanted to go to Alex and Will’s party but you. The reason we got in that car was because of you.”

“You were the one who crashed, Kandace. You were drunk,” I say as I let out a sob. 

“We were all drunk!” she screams. “We were always drunk.”

Kandace gets up from the couch and moves to the kitchen, one arm trailing the wall to keep her stability. I don’t dare move an inch. She takes the bottle of wine from the kitchen and turns back to face me.

She motions to the apartment, the wine dangerously sloshing around in the opened bottle. “You don’t deserve any of this.” She squints her eyes. “You’re a killer.”

“Did you just come here to tell me that? Is that the only reason you’re here?”

“No, but while I’m here I might as well let you know. Sydney is dead because of you, and you’re sat here all high and mighty as some fancy lawyer or whatever the fuck like nothing happened.”

Somewhere beneath the anxiety bubbling in my stomach I feel rage at those words. I find the strength to stand up and say between sobs, “Get the hell out of here.”

“So, you kill one best friend then kick the other out in street? You’re mental. You belonged in that psych ward, not me.”

“Get out,” I repeat through gritted teeth. I ball my hands into fists knowing fully well I could never use them in a fight. I don’t know how to fight.

“You are still so obsessed with her. You’re still in love with the girl that you killed six damn years ago? That’s fucking pathetic, Amelia.”

Grief and anger claw up my throat with their long talons. I scream for her to leave one last time in desperation, my throat stinging with piercing pain.

Infuriated, Kandace raises the bottle above her head and throws it in my direction. The glass shatters into the wall just feet from my head. Just as quickly as she walked back into my life, she walks out, leaving an echo of obscenities in her wake. 

I take a few minutes to slow my breathing. I try to repeat Dr. Montgomery’s words, you are not responsible, in my head like we exercised before, but all I can hear is, you’re a killer. It bounces around my head like a song. The once comforting, quiet room is now filled with noise and chaos. I work around the apartment getting rid of any evidence that she was ever here, like cleaning up after a crime scene. Does that make me the murderer or the corpse? I take a dust pan to the shards of glass splayed out on the floor. The wine splatter on the wall looks like blood. It could be blood.

Once the chaos in the room settles into confusion, I remember I didn’t write anything in my journal for today. I take the coffee-stained notebook out of my bag and flip to the page that still reads “Today feels—”. I pick up a pen and write, “—like six years ago.”