goldstarwife | (no subject)

She's walked by it more than a dozen times now. The figure seems odd to consider when she's been in Darrow such a short time, but Julia didn't hesitate to go out looking for work, which came about rather easily. With the holidays approaching, every store possible seems to be hiring seasonal workers, and it seems like as good a place to start as any. She has plenty of experience as a shopgirl, and though that may have been some seventy years ago, she doesn't think things could have changed so much as all that. The registers are different, the computers that operate them even more so and entirely baffling, but most of what she finds herself doing is the same as it ever was. The routine of it holds no inconsiderable amount of comfort. It's hardly fulfilling, but neither was it before. She doesn't need fulfilling; she just needs to be doing something, even if that's only just going through the motions of a life like she did after Michael died.

There could be more for her, if she wanted that. Something in her woke up when Donny first dragged her up to sing with him, and the past few weeks, before this place, she felt more alive than she had in well over a year, or maybe more than that. Despite knowing that she couldn't have had any say in showing up here, though, it feels a little like maybe it's time to give up on that dream. She can still scribble her poems in a notebook, still consider that they might make good lyrics. She can go back to singing in a church choir. But losing the band and the chance to compete has been a considerable blow, and in the absence of that, it's easy to chide herself and call it foolish, say that she ought to put the whole thing to bed.

It would be easier if she didn't pass by the music store on her way to and from work each day. Every time, she's tempted to go in and look at the instruments, and every time, it hurts a little to make herself keep walking instead. In the end, she wears down easily. It can't hurt to look, to have something to occupy herself with. Growing up, they always had at least a piano in the house. Her apartment now is empty and inhabited only by her. A hobby wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.

When she finally does walk in one afternoon, it's almost surprising how much there seems to be. At least her own choices of instruments are few. She doesn't know where in here or even if she might be able to find a ukulele, but she's in no hurry, instead wandering around slowly, the sight of everything bittersweet as she takes it all in.

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"They really do," Julia agrees, earnest and without hesitation. "It's the first thing that sort of... pulled me out of the slump I'd been in. Got me living again." She'd been getting by, before Donny came along with his talk of a band and going to New York and making it big, but that was all. Drifting, going through the motions, isn't the same as really having a life. Of course, showing up here, she's wound up back where she started in a lot of ways, but it feels safer for now, when she's lost everything she'd finally managed to rebuild.

"Funny. That feels like so much longer ago than it actually was."

"I know this is gonna make me sound like an old maid or somethin', but time sure does have a way of gettin' away from you, doesn't it?" Beth asks, laughing softly. She knows she sounds like her father when she says things like that, the kinds of platitudes that might seem insincere coming from someone else, but Hershel Greene had always managed to make them sound as if he meant them.

And as if they meant something new, just because he was the one saying it.

"But it's true," she says. "One day you're doin' something new and you look back at memories and they seem to exist in this far off place you can't touch any longer. But then you really think about it and realize six months or a year ago really isn't that far away. It just feels like it... like it's all gone."

"You don't sound like an old maid, I promise," Julia says, letting out a surprised little breath. "I... wrote something saying the same sort of thing once." Maybe it shouldn't be unexpected, but for all the boys who didn't make it home from the war, she isn't really used to talking to people who've been in a similar position to hers. There's something almost refreshing about it, being reminded that it's not just her, hearing words so close to her own coming from someone else. She'd have liked Beth instinctively, she thinks, but it's even truer for that sense of kinship, of understanding.

"That, or we both sound like old maids. Which might be just as likely, I don't know." Judging by her smile, she doesn't really think that's the case, but being a touch self-deprecating about the whole thing has helped her stay sane. "It really does, though, I think. Just passes before you can even realize it."

"I'm okay with that, I think," she decides with a laugh. There are things she worries about, perceptions of others, especially now that she's getting deeper into this entire career as a musician, but when it comes to Julia, it's a little different. They've only just met, but she likes to think they have a connection already, similarities they might not share with others.

"Sometimes it's crazy for me to realize just how long I've been here," she admits. "I was only nineteen when I arrived and now I'm twenty-four."

It's the longest she's been anywhere since the farm. Without Darrow, she doesn't think she'd have ever found something else like this. Nothing in her home would have ever been so stable.

"And five years can seem like a lifetime," Julia says, that much, too, a matter of experience. Five years was long enough for her to go from a wife to a widow, to think she knew what her life was going to be only to have it turned on its head. Maybe in a place like this, it might be a bit more understandable at home, where everyone was trying to go back to the way things were while that, for her, was entirely out of reach. Here, everyone who shows up from somewhere else has had their life stripped away in some regard, which might help a little, but it's still now, talking to Beth, that she feels like she's found someone who gets it, with similar losses behind them.

"It's hard to imagine. Being here for that long. I don't know how you've done it."

In Beth's case, there really isn't any other option, but it's not as if any of them have a choice. Still, for all she's told Julia today, she doesn't think she's ready to start talking about how she died at home, how Darrow is really the only life she has, so she only shrugs and smiles.

"It's not so bad in a lot of ways," she says. "It can be weird and it's different, but a lot of the people here are really good. I'm not sure what I'd do without them."

Of course, if she left Darrow, she'd have no way of knowing what she was missing. The very thought of it all is too much most of the time.