Paint My World Yellow // DNF

Epilogue

Fine line - Harry Styles

It takes a lifetime. It will take a lifetime to possibly feel somewhat better. Maybe well enough to get up from the bed.

Or maybe it takes a year.

For a year i slept in my bed, staring at the ceiling, hoping for someone up there to spare me some pain. To take at least a tiny bit from it so i can turn to my other side.

And at first i felt George in my room, sitting on my desk, watching me and being disappointed, now i feel him floating somewhere around the room and making peace with the hurt that he left behind.

Because it's not easy.

It's not easy to be alright.

But after a year i'm ready to take a walk again and sit next to him in the green grass, wind running through the cemetery.

Maybe that's part of the healing. Hurting like never before and letting yourself do it. Letting the pain take over for a while and have fun with destroying your insides because there's only so much to destroy and then it moves on to someone else. Of course it leaves bits and pieces with you but most of it you are able to clean up.

Like tiny glass pieces from broken wine glasses. Some of it still makes tiny cuts in your bare feet as you make your way through the kitchen in middle of the night. And it hurts for a split second, you wonder what it is and then the memories start flowing back to you.

Drinking wine as it snows outside and the christmas lights on the streets are bright enough for you to turn off the lights and watch the night slip by. As your friends laugh next to you about some distant childhood memories, maybe of you running through fields together as children or sitting in boring math classes.

And you remember the broken wine glass and the giggles as you cleaned it up.

Some of it is still left on the floor.

The wine is the only thing that you couldn't keep. It flowed away down the creeks in the wooden floors and you had to soak it up in kitchen towels. The smell of wine still lingers if you push your cheek next to the floor.

And you tend to do that a lot.

Push your cheeks next to the things that hurt you the most.

Or maybe they come to you, the carpet making you trip seemingly out of nowhere and making sure that your soft cheeks have a reunion with the wine soaked floors.

George does that to me too.

When next autumn i go on a walk in the park he makes the wind suddenly push up close to me and my hands to slide in the pockets. There they meet a piece of paper. Or maybe George.

It's an old carnival ticket, my whole world scribbled on it with a faded grey pencil.

And when i finally make the courage to take a train out of London and with his notebook in my hand stroll through the small streets in Paris he makes me take unfamiliar turns and wake up in a paint store. It smells like home.

And by the stand of yellow paints where i find myself roaming, i notice Van Goghs quotes on the wall.

And he does that again when he makes the songs on my playlist sound just like him.

Or when i feel a new sunset setting in my soul he doesn't mind. He makes an appearance in my mind and as my lips meet new ones i don't imagine him there. The notebook runs through my mind but this time it's not because i'll never be in love again. It's because a new sunset is setting in my lungs and i swear i feel George smiling.

That same stupid smile, the one that he looked at me with when we were eighteen.

Because the truth is, this is not a sad love story.

The ending was never sad, it was actually a rather sweet little story about two artists. Being in love at the age of eighteen.

And the world that they left behind - it's beautiful.

George makes tiny appearances in my life and yours too, reminding us how much we actually adore the smell of wine on the wooden floors. Reminding us how much we adore the tiny glass pieces in our feet in middle of the night because it came with so much happiness, so much comfort.

And the splinters might hurt a bit now but they once made you happier than ever as your friends spilled the wine.

So you smile as your cheek meets the floor and you don't fuss too long as you try to get a tiny glass splinter out of you feet. And i smile as George stumbles in my life again and again. In tiny little things that he is.

After all this time, we'll be alright.

I'll paint it and you'll write it and we'll be alright.