i'm not super satisfied with the pacing of this page, but i'm hoping that the start of the next page can round off the lack of an extra beat i wanted here.
i had to do a ton of confusing research about the area sugar lives in and the MBTA -- ironically, sugar only lives a few miles from her place of work, but i wouldn't want to walk around in the middle of the night either.
i also ended up taking artistic liberties here anyway, too; the line she's taking technically only runs until 1 am. but, boston is slowly making more lines of the public transit system 24/7, so it's not too unbelievable to me that this line might just run all night in an alternate universe where people are furries.
there's little to no transition from "normal" colors to "ideation" colors here, because it's dark out, so most of the colors are used identically to the latter. still, the reader is at this point primed with expectations for the story. the first "beat" was to introduce them to the concept, the "second" beat was to inform them that it was going to be repeated, and the third time just confirms the expectation to them.
there's so many small "plans" that never come to fruition, for one reason or another. i imagine, if they are repeated so much, there are these associations with suicide embedded in them. i think that some objects sugar can't help but immediately think about suicide when she looks at them, just because she's thought of those two things together so many times.
the next page starts with sugar already on the trolley, still daydreaming about the same thing, kind of like repeating it in her head to pass the time. part of this comic, i wanted to be not just about "not getting better," but being trapped in symptoms simply because you have "practiced" them so much, they no longer require conscious effort or seem foreign instead of like your own behavior you're choosing to do. so the next page mainly establishes the repetitiousness of the habit, may even imply that sugar does this when she's bored to pass the time sometimes.
also, i forgot to "night sketch" in the first panel, didn't want to redraw it right now... so that's why it looks like that, lol