DAYLIGHT FADING

sixteen | i'll always remember you the same

                       | sixteen: i'll always remember you the same |

                                                          or

                              | keep your head up: ben howard |

 

I sleep for a long time after Chris leaves. It’s a dreamless one and I wake with the disconcerting feeling of having a gap in my head. You know there is something in between what you can last clearly remember and now, but there’s just blackness in your head.

I get up in an attempt to shake away my lethargy, glancing at my clock and groaning when I realise it’s well into the afternoon. Part of me forgot that going to sleep at 5 o’clock in the morning was a bad idea.

Despite my sleep, I feel drained. All of the crying and yelling and music has left me feeling like there’s nothing inside of me, like I’ve been reduced to skin stretched over bones.

I can’t quite believe that everything happened in a day. The barbeque, the talk with Chris, Adam. I have no idea what to make of any of it. Under the light of day, I can’t piece anything together. I’ve just been given half of a jigsaw puzzle with no picture and none of the pieces match up.

I can’t figure it out so I decide to make myself look like a human being instead of a zombie. It’s always a good first step.

I find myself putting on another one of Adam’s old band t-shirts, tucking some shorts on underneath it even though you can’t see them. I leave my hair to its wild curls, putting on a light coat of mascara and covering the dark circles under my eyes. I don’t look perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s something.

My doorbell rings and I freeze as my brain begins to stutter let it not be Adam on repeat. I sigh, flipping the bathroom light off and walking down the hall, with all of my mother’s neutral colours.

When I got my apartment, I added splashes of bright and dark colours everywhere in a way my mother would have found unseemly. She always preferred a more ‘sophisticated’ palette, without a hint of anything garish.

I pull open my front door to see that this week’s colour is green. “Jez,” I sigh with relief and she just raises an eyebrow at me.

“It’s 4 o’clock in the afternoon, why the fuck are you waking up now?” she shakes her head at me, slipping past me and dropping her school bag to the floor, before turning to me, “you look like shit.”

“Why thank you,” my tone is dry, sarcastic, and Jez laughs at me.

“Just being honest,” she grins, “Ben Howard. I have a new appreciation for Ben Howard.”

“Is this your way of saying you want to learn some?” she gives me puppy dog eyes and a hopeful smile. I sigh at her before she practically leads me, skipping down the hallway, to find an acoustic guitar.

There is nowhere I love listening to Ben Howard more than in Eastfields. It reminds you of sand and summer and there’s something all the more enchanting about listening to it where there is all of that. Just to lay on the beach, all warm and sunbathed, listening to the soft strains of acoustic guitar and his voice and the odd intermittent crashing of the waves.

If someone had told me a few months ago that anyone could progress with an instrument as fast as Jez is with guitar, I’d have laughed at them, but she’s got a combination of natural talent and the stupidest work ethic ever that means that she comes back twice as good as she was the last time I saw her.