if devotion is a river

then i'm floating a w a y

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It was often rare for Nadia to be at a loss for words. She was a gifted chatterbox, and it was one of the many reasons I loved her. It was why we'd gotten along for all these years and why she was my only close girl friend. Where I lacked in emotional depth and sensibility she made up for it by having lightning-quick reactions and practically no filter.

Watching my wedding video stunned her into silence; her mouth hung wide open like the screws keeping it together just popped out and I wasn't even sure if she had blinked for the entire fourteen minutes. The last time I saw her like that was about two weeks ago when I told her about Gus and I eloping. Her reaction was exactly the same now as it was then.

After the video ended, she still didn't say anything. She had been bugging me all week about it, so I promised her once we got through Donatella's show alive that I'd let her see it. Three o'clock in the morning on our only Saturday in an incredible foreign city like Milan seemed to be the one and only time to show her.

"Are you kidding me?" She choked out the words, finally. When I looked at her sitting next to me instead of at my discarded stilettos on the floor, I realized she was actually crying. "That was..." she stopped to gently dab at her eyes with her fingers. "Precious. I don't think I've ever seen anything like it. Forget all that stuff I said about annulments or whatever. You two are meant to be. I'm calling Jeremiah right now and telling him we need to get married."

"Oh, stop it," I chuckled, snatching my phone out of her hand. "You know you guys are gonna have the most spectacular wedding."

"Yeah, if he ever proposes," she sneered to herself. "He's already thirty-six. The age gap never bothered me before, but I'm hoping he might want to settle down soon. Preferably before I'm over the hill, as they say."

"He will propose, trust me. He'd be an idiot not to," I reassured her, and since she knew I was right, it got a little smile out of her. "So, was the video worth waiting for?"

"One hundred percent. Can I watch it again?"

"Absolutely not."

She crossed her arms and pouted at me for rejecting her request as she mumbled, "Bitch."

As I laughed at her usual choice of insult for me, my attention went to my phone that buzzed on my lap with a new text. A dopey grin spread across my face as soon as I read it.

🖤can you fucking come home already??? I'm tired of waking up alone

two and a half days left... we got this

Rather than spending time catching up on sleep, Nadia and I were unwinding by having a heart-to-heart on the couch in the living room of Donatella's Milan apartment after what would now be known as "the week that nearly killed me".

And I thought Sutton's wedding was bad. Fashion week was like the last two years of my life jammed into seven long, excruciating, mind-blowing days. Still, it was all that I'd dreamed it would be and more from the minute Donatella hired me almost four years ago. Mentally and physically, I was hanging on by a thread, but I couldn't have been more grateful to be a part of it all.

The first two days were by far the worst. Sunday didn't necessarily count since we spent it on an airplane and by the time we landed, we were escorted into a taxi, got to the apartment to unpack, ate dinner at this tiny restaurant a few doors down, and went right to sleep. Monday and Tuesday were all prep work for Donatella's show – fittings, runway rehearsals, reworking the seating chart, more fittings, and meetings on meetings on fucking meetings. With the press, with influencers, with magazine editors, with other designers. You name it, we spoke to them.

From Wednesday on when the shows started, we were out of the apartment by seven AM and didn't come home before midnight. Nadia and I, with passes tacked onto our shirts that allowed us to go anywhere with Donatella, followed our boss around like two toady's playing shadow. She introduced us to some associate designers on Fendi's team, she got us in the front row for Versace's show, and most importantly, she didn't murder us.

Between all this glitz and glamor, we still had to make sure Donatella's show went on without a hitch. Her slot was on Friday afternoon at four o'clock and even though it was only yesterday, it seemed like it was months ago. Nadia and I were glued at the hip standing backstage with Donatella and her brother who had come in from the Amalfi Coast just to watch her show. She calmly observed the masterpiece collection she deemed "eclectic romanticism", going up to peek from behind the curtain every now and again, not a word slipping from her mouth for its entirety.

When the show concluded and the models did their final walk-through on the runway, Donatella kissed her brother on the cheek, sauntered out behind the models, and thanked the crowd with a timid wave and a content smile. Then she came backstage, gave a loving squeeze to my shoulder along with Nadia's, and was off to deal with the press.

And I thought I was terrible at showing my emotions. Donatella may as well have been a bronze sculpture. I swore nothing could penetrate her.

Now, it was all over. We had two and a half days left and no work, so we had to keep up our image and attend the remaining scheduled shows until fashion week officially came to a close with a grandiose celebration on Monday night. On Tuesday afternoon, we were flying back to Philly – back to normal again.

Although there were plenty of things I missed about home, I was going to miss our ridiculous Italian lifestyle a little more. Surviving off of no sleep, two meals a day that consisted of only coffee or pasta, and ample amounts of red wine wasn't healthy in the slightest, but Nadia told me there was no other way to do it. You had to eat whenever you had a spare second to breathe or were too close to fainting, you needed the wine to spark inspiration and keep your spirits high, and sleep was simply for the weak.

I thought she was exaggerating. I learned pretty damn quickly that she wasn't.

We had planted ourselves on our boss' royal blue velvet couch since we got home and hadn't moved once. Moschino was the last show for the night and following it, their team hosted the most extravagant after-party I had ever witnessed. I lost track of how many supermodels I saw there, how many actors I'd drooled over, and how many drugs were being passed around like complimentary hors d'oeuvres. Nadia and I stuck by one another in the lawless underground club, admiring the male dancers and the excellent lineup of disco music.

I was busy reminiscing about our night that felt like a flashback to the eighties when another person entered the living room.

With featherlight footsteps, Donatella appeared before us, decked out in her matching silk ivory pajamas that probably cost as much as my rent. Her jet black hair was swept up into an unruly bun and an eyemask sat on top of her head, her skin free of any makeup and frankly, wrinkles too. I had no idea how the hell she kept up that kind of complexion when I was probably less than half her age and already felt so decrepit.

When her vision adjusted and she noticed us, she looked startled if just for a second. "What are you girls still doing up?" She questioned hoarsely.

"Just talking," Nadia spoke up for both of us.

Donatella nodded at her answer and padded towards us, taking a seat in one of the accent chairs. Her eyes bounced around the room to take in the details as if she hadn't owned this place for twenty years.

It had an old-world kind of charm mixed with modernism and the DiNardo signature flair. Warm white walls with high ceilings and intricately carved gold crown moulding, vibrant velvet couches, faux cowhide rugs, and a vintage clawfoot tub in her bathroom that I would die for. Besides that, my favorite part of her place had to be the French doors in the living room that opened up to the balcony that overlooked the streets. It had a seating area where Donatella would decompress and drink her espressos in the morning. If I lived here, I'd be out there every second of every day.

"I was asleep, now I am not," Donatella declared with a frustrated sigh. "Fastidiosa. What is it you're talking about?"

I glanced at Nadia and we both hesitated with a response. Then she uttered, "Bayla had to show me something. We're just... discussing our men."

Donatella's lips curled up with intrigue at our topic of choice. She shifted in her chair so she was sitting on her legs and suddenly it felt like the three of us were just three middle school girls having a sleepover and gossiping way past our bedtime.

"Tell me more. Please, I need distraction," she begged.

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. Nadia didn't know what to say either.

Donatella didn't know about my eloping stunt. She was the last person I ever thought I'd tell. My family didn't know for fuck's sake, although I wasn't about to deny that their lack of knowledge was completely my own doing. Now that I was in the process of changing my name, I guess my boss deserved to know just as much as anyone else.

At the same time that Nadia started humming a random tune, I cleared my throat for everyone's focus.

"So when I was Hawaii for my sister's wedding, something happened," I explained ominously, which made Donatella furrow her eyebrows. Instead of delaying it any longer, I came right out with the truth. "I... eloped with the guy who I have been dating for almost seven years now, but at the time we were sort of 'broken up'. I guess technically we were taking a break but the bottom line is we weren't on the best of terms. We drank a ton at my sister's reception and then left early to elope with the best man as our witness because his friend is an ordained minister, or whatever. And yeah... that's pretty much what we were just talking about."

Like I said, Donatella wasn't the best at expressing her emotions. She blinked at me a few times, processing everything I said for so long that her silence drove me to keep on rambling. I never thought I'd be venting about my relationship it to my boss, per se, but if there was any person whose opinion I trusted more than my own, it was Donatella's.

"We've always had a weird relationship. Toxic, you could say. We started dating when we were so young, I guess we thought things would get better as we got older, but it never really did. Instead, we got so used to it that it became normal for us, which wasn't good," I spoke lowly, like admitting that out loud was a mortal sin. "We broke up one other time a few years ago for a really short amount of time and other than that, it's always been us. Marriage wasn't something we ever talked about and in my mind, I thought we would just be... together. Now that this is my life and it's real, part of me still feels like we should be taking our time, thinking about this and the consequences, but I guess we're in too deep at this point to go back. I don't know. I should really just be happy with where we're at right now."

"Bayla, you love this man, no?" Donatella abruptly asked me. Without a moment of hesitation, I nodded my head because that was one question I never needed to think about. "And you want to be with him, correct?" Was her next question. Again, I nodded. "So why don't you do what you said and focus on that rather than what you think you should be doing?"

And I'd be damned if that simple of a statement didn't knock the wind out of me. Even in the middle of the night with zero makeup and an eyemask on her head, she was still the most intimidating woman I'd ever know.

"If I did what I thought I should be doing or let other people control my life, I would not be where I am today. I would have married the man that my father had picked out for me when I was sixteen years old and not followed my dreams. I wouldn't have left my home or my family at eighteen to live in Milan and study fashion. I wouldn't have moved to America to become a designer. I wouldn't have met Sergio."

The casual mentioning of her ex-husband had me absentmindedly roll my lips into my mouth. I felt Nadia sigh beside me because of it, too.

Donatella hardly opened up about anything at all, but something that was completely off-limits no matter the circumstances was Sergio. I had heard about him in passing from my coworkers, never directly from Donatella herself. I didn't know their story and honestly, I had always been too scared to ask. Nadia, having spent more one-on-one time with our boss than I had, told me in all the years she'd only brought him up maybe two times at most.

All I gathered from bits and pieces of information was that they had a mystical kind of love that everyone thought was everlasting until one day it wasn't. In some way, I could deeply relate to her.

"You speaking of this man reminds me a lot of Sergio and me," she said, and although her voice was steady I could feel the slightest of trembling in her tone. "He is my soulmate, he always will be even though we aren't together anymore. I thank him every day for coming into my life and bringing me such joy. It got to a point where we could not make it work, but I can hear it in your voice that this man is different. You love him with everything you have. I can see that."

My head was nodding automatically in agreement as I murmured, "I do."

"Stop worrying about what you think you should be doing. You're going to waste a lot of time if you do. You love this man and you want to be with him, it's as simple as that."

She was right. It was that simple, and I just had a natural fault for making things more complicated. If she didn't terrify me to my core or move at a million miles a minute, I'd ask Donatella to be my therapist.

That being said, she didn't give me much time to dwell on her words. Her coffee-colored gaze bore a hole into my head with her words lingering in the air as she rose from her seat, readjusting her eyemask once she was standing.

"Thank you for the chat, girls," she announced, following it up with a yawn. "Now get to bed. Our work is done for the week, but we still have many things to do. You need your beauty sleep, and so do I."

She wasn't wrong about that, although the term "beauty sleep" wasn't something I could ever comprehend. Just like a mother telling her misbehaving kids to go to bed, we obeyed Donatella and bid her goodnight. With a soft smile spared our way, she silently scurried back into her room and slid the doors shut.

Nadia and I were still reeling from the drug-induced disco we witnessed all night, so we helped each other up from the couch and drug ourselves to the spare bedroom, leaving our discarded heels by the couch.

After washing my face and changing into a baggy t-shirt, I just about plopped down on the mattress when my phone buzzed once more.

🖤just gotta tell you I love you before I head into work. I'll call you later

And I fell asleep with a smile on my face.

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- holy SHIT it has been a minute since i've come on here. wow. hi. how are ya?

tbh it's been so long that i don't even know what to say right now lol. to summarize for you: i am officially a full time working gal and as if work didn't take up my life before this happened, it definitely does now. we moved into our bigger location a month ago and shit is WILD 24/7. that being said i do not have time for writing like, at all. hence my major absence on this site. when i'm not working i'm legit just... sitting on my couch. or i'm out with my friends trying to erase my memory of working. life is ... something else!

this chapter is a filler, clearly. it's not the most exciting or the best thing ever, but it needed to happen to move things along since there are only a handful of chapters left in this baby. i was debating on just skipping the entire fashion week thing, but i thought that it was such a huge moment for bayla's career that i owed it to her. so i guess in a way it IS exciting (for me at least) because this is the shit i live for and i would straightup DIE if i was in her place.

thoughts???? if any??? sorry i made y'all wait so long and only for a filler chapter. tbh i had this chapter almost done about a month ago but i Did Not have the time to properly finish it off bc i'm a psycho perfectionist. it's not edited or proofread but i just wanted to get something up for you guys so you don't totally forget about me :')

i don't know what month it is, what time it is, where i am or what i'm doing, but thanks for coming back to read The Shitshow. i don't wanna say i'm in a weird hiatus with this site but i think i am? idk. i gotta get into the groove of working all the time now and see what happens. just bear with me while i drown in the lake that is Adult Life. ANYWHO ON THAT NOTE THANK YOU SO MUCH & I LOVE YA LOTS!!!!

xoxo, sabbbycat