The Bar at the End of the Universe

(OOM: "All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.")

(Content Warning for this OOM include: mentions of domestic violence and drug use, guns, threats of violence, blood, and death.)

Max still felt a little unmoored and light-headed by the time Chloe dropped her off and she stepped back through the doors of Blackwell again. And she wasn't ashamed at the heady relief that flooded her upon seeing Milliways instead of her school. She shouldn't feel that glad about it, but the morning had been... rough. More than rough.

She could still feel remembered terror like a knot in her chest, tightening her throat and turning her stomach. She wanted to scream. She... she kind of needed to scream. If she didn't let it out, it would just sit there in her throat, choking her while she struggled to focus in Mr. Jefferson's class.

So it wasn't so much an executive decision as something Max just did, then, when she made a detour by the couch to snag one of the thickest throw pillows, and took it with her to the bathroom. It was probably best to have a solid door between her and the rest of the place, even with the thick, fluffy pillow to help muffle the sound.

It helps, screaming. It really does. Screaming doesn't solve anything, but it does something. It puts raw effort and sound into what one keeps bottled up, what one can't explain. And once the seal is broken, everything starts to come out, it pours out. Even after her throat was sore and she had run out of energy to scream, she cried into that pillow until she was out of tears.

Eventually, after a long while, Max emerged from the bathroom. She had washed her face and dried her eyes. Her throat hurt, her eyes burned, and her head felt squashy from crying so hard, but she no longer felt like she was about to explode from pent-up... whatever that was.

She couldn't think of anything to order at first, when she approached the counter, standing there quietly with the pillow. Kindly, the Bar manifested a napkin asking if the pillow needed washing. Max ducked her head, grateful, and set the much-cried-upon pillow on the counter to be... whisked away to be cleaned, presumably.

Max was thirsty, but... she didn't want to sit, either. Instead of ordering from the bar, she made her way into the kitchen to make herself a cup of the strongest tea she could find.

(OOM: (Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.)

Breaking the early morning quiet of the bar, Max Caulfield stumbled backwards through the door, the impact sending the door swinging open to bounce off the wall behind it. Beyond its frame is a trashed dorm room, clothes and books strewn across the floor and with angry red graffiti scrawled across a photo collage wall over a twin bed.

With shaking hands, Max grabbed the door and shut it firmly, leaning against its solidity to brace against the dizziness that threatens to overwhelm her and trying like mad to regulate her shallow, frantic breaths into something that will calm her racing heart.

[oom content warnings include bullying, depression, reference to potential sexual assault, terroristic threatening]

(OOM: "In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.")


(Content Warning for drug use, domestic abuse, references to ptsd and drugged drinks.)