George didn't expect much of his life. He come to be rather complacent with the ways things had turned out to be. He wasn't unhappy, per se, just very uninspired by the world around him. He found himself with little more than vague enthusiasm toward...
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Matty had to admit that it was anxiety that kept him awake - kept his mind whirring, turning itself inside out and on its head, as it struggled in systematically worrying about every single thing that it was physically possible to be concerned with.
George had been surprised when Matty had told him the night before, and in a weird way, although Matty had expected him to be, he wished that it wasn't like that. He wished that he could begin pretending now - properly put everything together in his mind like his was living a proper life, like they were a proper family, like there was just one thing in his life that he hadn't managed to fuck up.
But things just didn't work that way. His mind kept him awake, thrown back elsewhere, thrown back to when he was sixteen, to the very moments in which everything had all gone wrong. In those very moments in which he'd let it, because as much as he'd tried to avoid that fact all along, this was just his fault, and it had always been so. It was in that, however, that he knew he had to fix it, because there was just nothing else he could do.
George had spent last night looking at him a little differently. Only when he reckoned Matty hadn't noticed, or wasn't looking at him, but Matty had picked up on it in the end. Matty couldn't quite pinpoint what it was, but again, something had changed, and Matty just wasn't sure if he wanted to figure out what that was immediately, as he would have before. It wasn't that he wanted to prolong it, postpone it to the point of nonexistence, but just let it happen, let it naturally come to take its course, as it eventually would.
There was also the part of him that lay assured that it couldn't be much of a bad thing anymore. This was the part of him that had come to trust George more than he'd ever imagined to be possible, and of course, this was likely the most fragile part of him, but perhaps at that moment in time, it was the part that spoke louder than the rest.
They'd gone to bed at around one in the morning - perhaps later than they should have done, but neither of the two had really minded: letting themselves make the mistake of a late night, and dealing with the regret of it in the morning. At least, George would do so, as he'd managed to get to sleep within fifteen minutes or so of lying there, but come half four in the morning, Matty still lay awake: now on his back, gaze fixated up at the ceiling, trying to focus on the slight crack in one corner of it in the low light of the room, and indeed anything but what was really at hand.
He spent a good ten minutes focusing on his own breathing - the steady rise and fall of his chest as he took breath in and then out. When that failed, he spent a good ten minutes focusing on George's: holding his own breath for varying amounts of time in order to align their breathing patterns, because that was the kind of stupid shit that Matty did now apparently. He then turned over, watching the clock on the wall for a while, watching the minutes tick by, and wondering just what time would be appropriate to properly wake up.
It was apparent to him by now that he just wouldn't be getting any sleep that night. Perhaps that wasn't exactly for the best, perhaps there he was, making another terrible decision, but he found that there was just so very little he could do about it, and to some degree, maybe that was okay. To some degree, however, it wasn't, but regardless of degrees and opinions, and all that kind of bullshit, he still lay awake, sleepless, his mind creeping back to his seventeen year old self and focusing in on every single mistake he'd made.
