#every little time they defy each other’s worst or most exasperated expectations in this movie and trade small smiles it made me feral lmao | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

lighthouseroleplay · 5 years

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ISABELLE ‘IZ’ PARK

( 21 , cis woman , she/her )

♪♫ currently listening ⧸⧸ stupid girl by garage

the bitterness of black tea, worn-in leather boots that stomp on the floor, killing every plant she owns but buying more just to try again. old t-shirts, the crunch of a popsicle on a warm day, neat, handwritten notes. the rattle of a windowpane as rain pours from dark clouds, a silver necklace with matching bracelet. evenings spent buried in history documentaries, stubborn frowns, flickering neon.

• moon started off as a lab partner your junior year; never much of a thought in your mind unless you were working on anatomy homework. you don’t mean to stumble upon your mother’s past, the future your father took on while forgetting all about you. he’s happy with his real family, his seemingly perfect daughter that you somehow happened to be paired up with in class. you can’t help but turn a cold shoulder to the girl you’ve paid only a little attention to for most of your life. as much as you want to let go of the bitterness, it hurts to think that she’s the one your father chose to care for.

• ackerman has been your closest friend for as long as you can remember. of course you heard the whispers about her family, the rumors about her that swirled through your small town, and yet you couldn’t bring yourself to care. she’s been by your side through everything, from first crushes to revelations about your family you never really expected. she softens your rough edges, brings caution when you’d rather throw it to the wind. even with her miles and miles away, she is a constant comforting presence in your life.

taken by v/sloth ⧸⧸ tiana tolstoi

tw: depression, cancer mention, attempted suicide

Y’know, you came out swinging, her mom said quietly, holding in a laugh. She dabbed a cotton swab soaked with iodine onto her daughter’s scraped knee and smiled at some far-off thought. Grandma had been the stern one. She’d seen the teacher’s note about “behavioral misconduct” and her wrinkled, fleshy face had gone hard. You’re too old for this, Isabelle Park. Brawling on the playground like I didn’t raise you better. Izzie had felt her eyes burning, but she’d been unable to find the words to explain what had happened: how some boys from her class had circled her like a pack of dogs and jeered, Where’s your dad? Where’s your dad? until she had felt that terrible shame bringing heat to her face, blood rushing behind her eyes, turning her sight dark. She had decked the biggest of them with a closed fist and left him crying in the dirt. Now, her mother applied the bandaids and smoothed the flyways at her temple. She kissed the cheek where tears were still drying. You weren’t a screamer, but I remember those tiny, tiny fists, swinging at anyone in reach. Izzie could see the memory that wasn’t even her’s: the tiny infant lifted up against the bright lights of the delivery room, batting the air as if to clear everyone away— the doctors, the nurses, even her own exhausted mother, watching in awe.

She isn’t sure when she realized that her mom wasn’t like other moms. She knew, as early as childhood awareness would allow, that her family wasn’t like other families. There was an absence in photographs and on parent signature forms where a father should have been, but that didn’t bother her; it wasn’t an ache she would feel until much later. Instead, Izzie grew up knowing mostly warmth and happiness in that run-down Victorian where the shingles slid off the roof every rainy season, and the gutters were constantly clogged with putrified leaves. She lived with her mother and her grandmother and the old, bristly fox terrier that her grandfather— long-dead before she was born— had left behind. Her grandmother was a fearsome pillar of a woman: stocky and broad-shouldered, her dark hair shot through with streaks of iron and pleated down her back. Nothing feeble about her; she seemed to grow more solid with each passing year, like an ancient oak. Often, she took Isabelle by the chin and turned her this way and that, saying, God broke the mold with you. But Izzie secretly liked to think God had re-used one of his favorite molds, the same one that he’d made her grandmother with. There was no one in the world she more reverently admired, no one she more fiercely wanted to become.

It was her mother who was the anomaly. She was different in a way that defied easy explanation; for many years, Grandma would not answer questions whenever Izzie ventured to ask them, instead ordering her to peel some more carrots in that clipped tone of voice that left no room for argument. But Izzie was an astute child. Nothing escaped her notice. She saw that her mother had a tendency to feel things in extremes; a soapy glass would slip from her grasp and pop into shards, and Izzie would watch her mother’s face crumple like cardboard left out in the rain, as if she’d just broken something irreplaceable. There were weeks of vegetative sadness, and dinners that Izzie and her grandmother ate alone because her mother refused to leave the darkened bedroom. Other times, she became sensitive and wild, highly reactive to the world around her. She’d throw fits at the blinking cashier who’d given her the wrong change, and snap unkindly at her daughter or her mother over minor grievances, making mountains out of molehills. Some days, though, she was transformed. The heavy clouds would shift; a burst of sunlight would bathe them all in warmth. Her mother would float into the kitchen and dole out kisses on the cheek, her face radiant with a pure, concentrated happiness— those were the times Izzie loved her the most. She loved her mother so hard in those episodes that later, she’d look back on them with a certain guilt, recognizing them for the mania that they were: her mom taking her out of school early, face flushed as if she’d been infused with someone else’s blood, taking her to the park to feed the ducks or to the aquarium three towns away. Always, she promised better adventures. Vacations to the redwood forests of California. Trips to see the mirrored skyscrapers of New York.

All throughout her childhood, Izzie was merely a spectator to the unpredictable moods her mother cycled through. She never paid much attention to how her grandmother handled them, the way she’d take her grown daughter into her arms like a child and coax her back from the brink with soft words meant only for her. Her grandmother was a good caretaker. She was the mast they could all lash themselves to in a storm. Because of her, they weathered each gale and came out on the other side, shuddering, shivering, but still whole. Izzie, meanwhile, had sprung up two inches above her classmates and stopped dealing black eyes to anyone who incurred her wrath. Instead, her anger had refined itself into a sharpened point; there was a condensed, dark kernel in the very center of her, and from it she began to cast a sort of furious solitude around herself, a shield that very few could penetrate. By late middle school, she wore only black. She found a pair of men’s Doc Martens at the thrift store and was thrilled by their thick-soled meanness, even if she had to double up her socks to compensate for the size. And she no longer went by Isabelle, or Izzie— it was Iz now, her elegant name shorn to a single brute syllable. It suited her. With that keen elfin face always watchful beneath eyebrows thin and arced like scythes, you could tell that she was a sharp one. She had edges to watch out for.

You might have an artist’s temperament, her grandmother noted one day, raising her eyebrows at the smudged ink sketches that Iz had scattered throughout her math notebook, which had been sent home with another exasperated note from her teacher. But not the talent. Her grandmother’s truths never concerned themselves with what they happened to destroy. Still, she was right; Iz was not an artist. She’d quit piano after a month, too impatient with her clumsy fingers, and her drawings, though painstakingly done, were flat and lifeless on the page. But while she didn’t have the ability to make art, Iz felt that she could still appreciate it. That had to count for something— she was desperate to distinguish herself from the small-town folk of Tennebrin Port in some way, convinced that their dull inner lives were nothing like her own bone-deep hunger for more. Movies in particular captivated her. When she had money, she spent it on DVD rentals or movie tickets. When she didn’t have money, she pestered the concession boys until one of them let her sneak in through the theater’s back door. Then she would creep from one back row to the next, watching movie after movie until all the enormous screens flickered to black, and only stopped doing this once the manager threatened to ban her. She consumed books and articles and Wikipedia pages with a voracious appetite, determined to know every little fact, to understand every intricacy of the film-making process. She began to worship her favorite directors; the walls of her bedroom became plastered with posters for Carpenter and Kubrick, Wong Kar-Wai, Fincher, Kurosawa. Once she started taking French classes in high school, she framed the poster for Jean Luc Godard’s Breathless above her bed.

When she thinks back on that summer, the summer that ushered in the worst year of her life, she remembers only pale, bled skies and unbroken heat, black flies stewing in the air, the briney smell of the ocean stinging her nostrils more sharply than ever before. Memories can change depending on what meaning we assign to them; even before Andrea Clare drowned, Iz remembers how that summer felt wrong, like a stagnant pool of water brewing disease. She had never known the girl that well— besides Angela, her friendships were limited to those she exchanged a few words with at lunch or in study hall, or those she negotiated with during the terse diplomacy of group projects. Iz would not disrespect a dead girl by pretending they’d ever been friends. But the looping footage of her death— and all the sound and sensation she came to associate with it— shifted something inside of her. She’d come to think of herself as an impenetrable fortress; she’d felt protected by the aloofness that kept her apart from the world. But as the days of July and August crawled by, with Tennebrin Port stunned into a stupor of grief, she was beginning to understand what death was and what it did. All of them on the shore shared in this terrible knowledge together; she wondered often about the others and how they were able to find space for it inside themselves, but never did she have the nerve to ask.

If Andrea’s death didn’t feel like an omen at the time, it certainly became one in retrospect. Her grandmother coughed blood into the sink one morning, as the leaves outside the window rustled in shades of copper and gold. Then came the quick raging of her cancer, an illness like a wild animal tearing through her body, and then she was gone, leaving only Iz and her mother behind in the old house, listening to the wind moan despondently through the attic. Iz took the death hard. She sank so deeply into herself that she emitted no light, becoming a hermit within her own body. Her grief made her turn teeth on well-meaning neighbors and teachers and classmates. She told Angela to fuck off so many times that the poor girl— her only real friend, the only one who understood the totality of her loss— finally did, and Iz wasn’t quite sure what to do with herself after that. Through that long, brutal winter, she’d come home from school and find her mother in bed as she’d been for weeks, her face swollen with tears, the ashtray by her bedside overrun with ashes, the acrid scent of pot smoke in the air. Iz would linger in the doorway and watch the blue light of the TV bouncing off her mother’s vacant gaze; then she’d close the door, and feel the gulf between them widening each time she crept upstairs, ashamed, in the dark. There was no way across it. Without her grandmother, the remaining Park women were as separate as two ice floes on the black Arctic sea. Each was now alone in a way that was permanent.

In the blue-and-red strobe of the ambulance, Iz wore a mask of calm just as her grandmother had, so many times before, and spent a week with her mother in the hospital watching monitors zig-zag like seismographs measuring aftershocks. Then she brought her back to the drafty, creaking Victorian under strict orders to never leave her unsupervised. Difficult to do, considering she was still in high school. Neighbors stepped in to help when she finally broke down enough to ask. Friends squirreled her study notes and cheatsheets for all the classes she missed, but still her grades— never better than average— began a slow descent towards rock-bottom. Her dreams of college felt laughable now; all the possible outcomes, all the imagined opportunities, all of them dwindled to nothing. She saw a long, dark patch of life waiting for her like a mile of black ice up ahead. This would be it: she’d be her mother’s sole caretaker, managing medications and hiding the alcohol, forcing her outside for some fresh air, cooking meals that she wouldn’t eat, steadily accumulating resentments like tallymarks on a prison wall. On and on, ad infinitum, until maybe she too succumbed to whatever sleeping gene had made her mother this way. Then they’d both be rattling around this old house, as crazy as two cuckoos. The future was almost as comical as it was bleak.

Somewhere around this time, her partnership with Moon began. The girl was a perfect example of how kind life could be to those protected from its worst blows: she was pretty and popular, never at a shortage of friends, never at a shortage of admirers. Things seemed to come easily to her as a virtue of her privilege. Once, this might’ve prompted nothing more than an eye-roll from Iz— and maybe some snide comments to Angela about the bourgeoisie— but now, Moon’s easy, effortless existence confronted her on a daily basis with just how shitty her own circumstances had become. The contrast was as plain as night and day when they sat next to each other in class: Moon lovely and immaculate in her expensive sweater sets and designer-brand jeans, Iz pale and fatigued in her ratty Goodwill finds which only came in mismatched shades of black, her stomach curdling with a childish bitterness that couldn’t be helped. But it turned out that Moon was also unexpectedly kind; whenever Iz didn’t show up for class, or didn’t have the energy to complete her portion of a lab report, Moon would cover without needing to be asked. It was this— the sparing of her sensitive pride— that she was most grateful for. As winter thawed into a more merciful spring, a tentative friendship took root, and began to grow.

They’d met at the Has Bean to cram for finals, and ended up lingering long after their study group disbanded, notes pushed to the side and dregs of coffee growing cold. Once the sole barista began sweeping the floors and shooting them looks of increasing urgency, Iz offered Moon a ride home in her rust-flecked Pontiac; the girl declined, saying that her father was already on his way. They waited outside. April was raw this year, blustery and cold. The wind rattled all the empty branches on this quiet street. Mr. Moon pulled up in his sleek car and rolled down the passenger side window to call to his daughter; when he put his eyes on Iz, she felt their weight and raised her own. The gaze she met was unsettlingly dark, just like hers. He stared. She stared back. They looked at each other like two startled animals caught under the same porchlight. She saw the pointed features and almond eyes, the parts of her which had never belonged to her mother’s side of the family, the strange, subdued fear waking in Mr. Moon’s expression. Instantly, she felt sick. She turned away, leaving Moon to blink after her in confusion, and walked quickly down the street with her head ducked and her hands balled into fists in her pockets. Then she sat in her car without moving until dusk became dark. Her knuckles were blanched on the wheel; each successive shudder made her feel like she might shake apart. She knew, she knew. She knew whose face she’d just seen.

It would be another month before she approached him. She couldn’t ask her mother for fear of the domino effect that it might trigger, but the certainty she felt after that first encounter didn’t need confirmation. Mr. Moon, for his part, agreed willingly to meet with her and didn’t ask why. They sat across from each other in the vinyl booths of some roadside diner, a safe distance away from town, and he ordered a plate of fries she didn’t touch, a soda that went watery with the ice that melted in it. Coolly, she sipped a glass of tap and watched the emotions darting openly across his face; the worry, anxiety, fear, shame, guilt. He didn’t want her to tell Moon, of course. He was a reputable man in Tenebrin, and he had a family to protect. Hearing the word family, Iz felt the surge of sour, tainted groundwater welling up inside of her, bringing all her toxins to the surface. The spite in her voice could’ve killed any growing thing. I don’t give a shit about your family. The immensity of her rage shocked her; she’d sustained all this anger towards a man she’d never even met. It had existed deep inside of her all these years, enduring, building layer upon layer in a process so slow that she had never noticed the added weight— until now. This was the heavy, compressed anger underlying everything else; she’d reserved especially for her father, and she wanted him to feel its impact like a blow from her own fist. I’m not going to say anything, and not because I don’t think you deserve to have your life ruined, because you do. It’s because I want nothing to do with you or your shitty family. And because my mother doesn’t need more shit being talked about her in town. Mr. Moon cleared his throat. They lapsed into silence as a waitress cleared their cold food, after which Iz wasted no time in getting to real reason she’d arranged this meeting: holding him accountable for what he’d done— or rather, failed to do.

This was the plan that would take her where she needed to go: she would go to a liberal arts college, one with a decent film program, somewhere inland where she wouldn’t constantly smell salt on the air or hear the distant, dull roar of the waves to remind her of this place. Tennebrin had become unbearable after all that had happened here; she wanted to rip herself out of the ground like a plant, roots snapping. The school would still be within state, close enough to home to prevent the guilt of abandoning her mother— she’d come back for breaks and vacations, and in the meantime, he would pay for a live-in nurse and whatever other types of care her mother might need. And though she wasn’t asking him to put her through college, a stipend towards tuition seemed appropriate, didn’t it? She laid out her demands with flinty eyes, making it clear what the repercussions would be if he didn’t comply. Iz had intended for this to be a scene of blackmail straight out of a Scorsese flick; in the month leading up to this moment, she had indulged vicious daydreams of how it would play out, how he’d stammer through apologies only for her to cut him off mid-sentence, denying him any forgiveness, any absolution of guilt. But life lacked the satisfaction of movies. With his quiet, calm manner, Mr. Moon only nodded as he watched cars leaving the darkened parking lot, throwing their headlights against the window. When he looked at her again, near the end, there was something in his tired face that his eyes were fighting to explain. I just need you to know, I tried. I would have tried for longer. But your grandmother… He stopped because of whatever change had come over her expression. Iz let him continue speaking, trying to keep down the thing that was rising swiftly in her stomach, displacing her heart into her throat. What should have come as a surprise to her, didn’t— it made sense, the role that her grandmother had played in his departure. The woman had always had a way of seeing straight into the marrow of people; if she’d sensed weakness in this man, so handsome and well-groomed in his dark business suit, then she must have been right to make the choice she did. As Mr. Moon told the story, Iz heard the explanation in her grandmother’s hoarse voice: he didn’t have the stomach for it. So she had forced him out, in the best interest of her daughter and then unborn granddaughter. She had released him. And the people of Tenebrin Port, with their eyes averted, had let a veil fall over this event, this shattering of what could’ve been a family, and the town had moved on in the way that small towns do, carefully preserving the secrets of those living inside it.

The day of Andrea’s death is imprinted in her memory for reasons she understands, and some that she doesn’t, but Iz forced that entire chapter of her life closed when she graduated from Cecil Morgan and moved away from Tenebrin Port. Four years at Whitman College afforded her the distance to blunt that memory and so many others; she retained her acerbic wit, her dark sense of humor, her sometimes turbulent moods, but her sharp edges became sanded down and she discovered that being around people was not such a terrible thing after all, which in turn made her a much more tolerable presence. She excelled in her film classes and did passably in others, still very much governed by her own interests. She partied, experimented with boys and girls alike, left dents in a couple hearts, collected a few scratches on the hard exterior of her own. College gave her exactly what she’d always been after. Freedom. It was a sensation that outweighed any sense of guilt towards her mother, but even her mother seemed better in these last few years, cooking all the meals whenever Iz came home for holidays, her nurse more like a companion, her smiles genuine as she listened to the sanitized stories Iz told of friends and eccentric professors and annoying roommates. All in all, Isabelle Park was doing just fine when the dreams started. Their onset didn’t seem to coincide with any anniversary she could pinpoint— not Andrea’s death, nor her grandmother’s. At first they were murky and shapeless, hybrids of imagination and memory that didn’t leave much of themselves behind, but slowly, they gained definition. There was the beach, the pale rind of sand and the dark, glossy ocean. There was Alderman’s Point where the old lighthouse stood, looming and sinister. In the dream just as in the memory, lightening ripped open the sky; in its sudden ghostlight, there was Andrea Clare, resurrected without logic or warning. Bobbing in the surf, her mouth open in a scream that the gulls echoed as they wheeled around her, the waves lapping over her, choking her, then erasing her entirely. Each dream replayed her death with startling clarity. After the first couple of doozies, Iz started to borrow her roommate’s prescription Ambien. That did the trick nicely— she coasted all the way through finals on heavy, dreamless sleep, and began to believe that the night terrors would simply resolve themselves like the strange fluke they were, weaning herself off the pills once it seemed like enough time had passed. But a few days before she was set to come home for the summer— newly graduated, completely unemployed, and staring down the barrel of her future— she had the worst dream to date. Everything was the same, except for Andrea’s scream; this time it was her own mother’s voice that was screaming, and she was screaming her daughter’s name, over and over, begging for help.

#skel: all #park #park: skel #skel: closed

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