I Won't Be Home This New Year

CASSIE VEESNA, WEEK 32 DAY 11, 23:36

(apparently my indents don't come over when I paste so I've given up on them.)
So, I was locked in a basement full of cockroaches. Fun times. I used to live in an old apartment that was also full of cockroaches, so I guess not much had changed. Except I was allowed to leave the apartment, occasionally eat three not too incredibly gross meals a day in the apartment, and communicate with another human being in the apartment.
    But hey, at least I was in the same Sector. One of the worst Sectors, but it was something. LowGround is better than NoGround, they always say. Actually nobody says that except for LowGround civilians that are trying to feel better about themselves. It confuses me to no end.
    I’d give away my favourite guitar to leave LowGround and never return. With Aurra, of course, I’d never leave her on her own here. We could even go to the Wilds, I’ve heard of people running off there that are tired of the mundane life.

Which Aurra and I definitely are, being treated like outcasts among other outcasts really gets to you, especially when you perform for those people almost daily. Entertainment is a very worthwhile career path around these parts, I make more money than most of the people who make fun of me, but that doesn't stop them. Of course I probably overwork myself, but I would never want Aurra to have to get a job in the area we live in. She couldn't handle the judgement. Even though she passes flawlessly, her coworkers still tended to figure it out about a month in, then they just couldn't help but talk about it. Which is not good for her, so I always made her quit.
Because of this I had to do double the gigs, which wasn't hard due to my reputation, but I did end up skipping a lot of meals. I was always slim, but the vigorous jumping around stages combined with the lack of meals made me skinny. Not good skinny; skin, bones, and a little bit of muscle skinny. Aurra always gave me worried looks whenever she’d see my ribs jutting out, and was always telling me that I needed to cut back on all the work, that she’d get a job, that she didn't need me to do everything for her, etcetera. Talks like that always ended in tears, then mutual downward mood slopes that turned into mint chocolate chip ice cream and TV shows from Earthen times. We both hated the Proximian ones, even though they were much more realistic and of higher production quality.
    Can't believe that that was what my life was like before the basement. I hated it to an extent, but it was way better than that hellhole. At least Aurra didn't have to deal with my wacky shenanigans anymore. Though I doubt she cared about that, she missed me when I went grocery shopping, two weeks not knowing where I was was probably killing her. I just hoped she knew I didn't mean what I wrote, not in the slightest. If she didn't, I couldn't even imagine the pain she was in. Pain that would be my fault, because with all my efforts to protect her, I couldn't even keep myself from getting kidnapped. I should’ve gotten an idiot of the year award.
Speaking of year, I wondered if it was still 697.  I hadn’t heard the countdown, so it probably still was. That would be the first New Year since 680 I’d spent without Aurra, which was an upsetting thought.

Okay, I thought, new plan, no Aurra thoughts. Those are sad. Sad leads to hysteria. Hysteria leads to panic. Panic leads to lack of air. Lack of air leads to passing out. Passing out leads to vulnerability. I can't let myself be vulnerable, not now.
I eventually decided to plan my escape. Why hadn't I thought of that earlier? It’s not like they’d let me out, and I had a strange feeling that they were going to kill me at some point in the near future. I heard the men who brought me my probably daily meal talking about having to feed someone that should already be dead, so that wasn't terrifying at all. I did have a window, and I was definitely small enough to fit through it, but I’d have to find a way to move my cot over there, which would be challenging considering it was chained to the wall. If only I had a laser.
The walls seemed to be quite old though, so maybe I would be able to just pull out the chains? It was worth a shot. I walked over to the sad excuse for a bed and pulled it out as far as it would go. After climbing on top of it I grabbed the chain on the left side and pulled as hard as I could. It didn't budge. Go figure. Letting out a stream of curses in English, Russian, and Mandarin, I collapsed face down onto the cot. One of the benefits of knowing three languages, three times as many curses.
It's fairly rare to know anything but English and Mandarin, the two main languages, even though English is technically the official one. Pretty clever to narrow it down, if you ask me, language block seemed to make a lot of tension for our Earthen ancestors. If they had all agreed on one or two unified languages, would the war still have happened? Probaby, it’s human nature to fight amongst ourselves. I'm honestly surprised Proxim has lived in peace for as long as it has. In the last 150 years of its life Earth saw three World Wars, and all of them together killed it. Slowly at first, and then almost all at once with the nuclear battles.
After five long minutes of thinking about Earth’s depressing downfall, I fell asleep, only to be woken up almost immediately by the people upstairs drunkenly counting down the seconds to the New Year. I groaned and plugged my ears, preparing for the eardrum slaying cheers. Once they seemed to have calmed down, I unplugged them and fell back asleep.