The days passed in a new, carefully constructed normalcy. Alyx had managed to reduce compulsive cleaning to a more acceptable routine, and although the apartment remained spotless from pure inertia of her previous discipline. Coffee had become her fuel, but now she measured it in cups (three a day, not six).
Still, her hands, after three months, went from a slight tremor every few days to a fine daily tremor, almost imperceptible, appearing in the afternoons when caffeine met nervous exhaustion. And the cigarettes had arrived—not just a couple every few days, but two every night, a kind of secret, self-destructive ritual she performed on the rooftop, watching the city lights as smoke left her lips.
Muay Thai was a hobby she took up with classes four times a week—this had been an unexpected and liberating discovery. In the gym, with her height—those 1.90m that always made her feel lanky—became an advantage.
In her classes, she learned to channel the silent rage, the helplessness, the guilt for not having stopped Lily with each roundhouse kick to the bag. Each impact, and finishing each class, left her more relaxed from her overwhelming emotions.
The other three days of the week, she dedicated to exploring oil painting, taking classes—a form of art she hadn't explored before. There, she didn't draw Lily or Marshall; she feared capturing all her memories with them and not being able to vividly remember the happy past moments, but the present pain and loneliness.
Instead, she painted fruit baskets under artificial light, urban landscapes from memory, and portraits of anonymous models. The surprise was discovering she had an innate hand for color and composition—she attributed this to the practice she had throughout her past life, though in a different area of drawing and painting, she found many similarities here. The teacher, a woman in her sixties with hawk-like eyes, once told her: "You have the look of an analyst, but the soul of an expressionist, though unexploited beyond the perceptions you want others to see, it maintains a tension that is interesting." Alyx didn't know how to respond, her mind full of borrowed memories and emotions on pause.
Her mornings were still dedicated to trading, sitting in front of the three monitors at her desk, Japanese candlestick charts rising and falling from supports—now she used fragments of memories from her other life, notions of emerging technology, the names of companies she remembered would take off, to make calculated investments. Of course, she wasn't going to throw a stone into a sea whose depth and correctness she didn't know due to her memories; it was backed by fierce analysis. Money now grew silently in separate accounts—one in particular she mentally named Escape Fund.
Because Alyx had made a decision. She couldn't stay indefinitely in the apartment that smelled of Lily and the shadow of what the three of them were. She began secretly looking for a place of her own, with very specific criteria she would never admit to anyone, not even herself. She looked for an apartment with a separate kitchen with good countertops—as Lily liked—spacious for one person with cabinets to store kitchen utensils, and a terrace or balcony of its own. Now she was looking for herself, but every time she saw a well-lit kitchen, she briefly wondered—would Lily approve? It was a mental habit she couldn't eradicate.
Her social life was reduced to evenings at MacLaren's with the group, listening to Barney's stories with a tense smile, enduring the saccharine sweetness of Ted and Robin—which, though she tried to ignore, produced a stab of bitter envy—and observing Marshall. He was already better. He laughed more, but sometimes his laughter was louder and less genuine. And on some nights when he got lost in thought, each time ended with Alyx looking towards the window by the bar door, the ghost of Lily from the night she spied on them always materializing in her mind, sharp and painful.
One afternoon, returning from shopping for the apartment, she found Barney and Marshall in the middle of a discussion on the sofa.
"Come on, buddy, to get you another woman today!" said Barney enthusiastically.
"I hate you! You've been stealing my 'sweets' these nights! I don't want to go out with you again!" protested Marshall, but his tone was more of theatrical annoyance than genuine refusal.
Alyx stopped at the kitchen entrance. Sweets, she thought—that's how Barney saw women, and he was teaching Marshall to see them objectified.
Barney slapped the sofa. "Today I won't steal them! I swear, we're going to a new bar near the university—The Scorpion and the Frog—with a young crowd, you'll seem mature and worldly. And I have the strategy: Operation Goodbye, Redhead!"
Marshall didn't correct him, didn't say anything. He only nodded weakly with a slight grimace on his lips. Alyx felt the floor tilt. Was he just forgetting Lily, or was he also erasing the last almost six years in which she had been part of that equation? Was he reducing her to an uncomfortable memory, like a third wheel that no longer fit into his new single life?
Marshall looked towards the kitchen, seeking her out. Alyx held her breath. Tell him no, tell him to stay, we need to talk. Tell him Lily is here, that she still loves you, and that I still love you. The words wanted to leave her mouth, bitter, mixed with the aftertaste of afternoon coffee.
But she stopped herself upon seeing that Marshall's eyes held neither pain nor confusion, but a faint spark of curiosity and a small, strange, morbid attraction to the abyss Barney represented. That first glimpse that wasn't pure agony in months. How could she, with her trembling hands and notebook full of memories, extinguish that spark, no matter how dangerous it was?