Kismet

Six [The Library]

Harry's vision is narrowing into a precarious tunnel, black on the edges and every object centralized in the middle of his field of vision is merely a rainbow pinwheel of a blur. The panic attack began the instant that his eyes connected with yours, the eyes that he's memorized in his dreams burning a hole right through him in waking life like the sun through a magnifying glass, his skin sizzling at the invisible contact.

The hyperventilating was induced as soon as you gathered the napkins from his sweaty grasp and the tip of your index finger brushed against his knuckle. Glitter sparkled where the stroke of union occurred, the electricity in the fuse of his mind blowing and short-circuiting his body useless. He's lucky that he made it out of the coffee shop before anyone noticed his sickly skin and abruptly spastic behavior. This district of the city isn't crowded enough to hide in; any head-scratching etiquette is surely reported on the spot and would be a quintessential example of his luck to have a Tocsin called on him while he was befuddled from meeting the person of his dreams.

Harry's palm is tucked in a cup underneath Pru's small back and bottom, his head spinning like a wobbly top that is about to lose its momentum at any moment and flop onto its side in defeat. His footing is so off-kilter that he may as well be hiking to the summit of a craggy snowcapped mountain in flip flops. His free hand lifts to press his shaky fingertips into his temples, a cold and clammy sweat breaking out all over his body, his stomach churning butter and splashing discarded milk up against the sensitive, bloated lining of his insides.

He feels just as ill as he does when he hears the slow creep of a Tocsin alarm penetrating the foggy air or when he wakes from a colored nightmare, his feet tangling together as he attempts to run and causing him to stumble against a bicycle locked up to a street sign, the jagged pedal banging painfully into his shin. He pauses his escape and rests his palm on his thigh, hunching over at the waist to inhale deeply though his nose and exhale through his mouth to stave off the panic attack rocketing in his sternum.

Is he supposed to go back and attempt to speak to you again? Was that his only chance in this lifetime? What is the galaxy trying to tell him? Were you still there or had you left as soon as you cleaned the latte from the front of your sweater? Did it even spill since he intervened and or did he possibly change the outcome of your coffee shop experience and perhaps the rest of your morning? How could he not have known that you've been living in his city for God knows how long, hiding directly underneath his nose and begging to be discovered around any corner at any moment? What would his premonitions surrounding you be like from now on; similar to how they always have been or would they take on new forms now that he knows a few more snippets about you? Would they cease completely?

His hysteria is attempting to drag him down to the ground, his heart trying to escape from his chest and his palms layered in a shallow pool of sweat. On top of running into you, his paranoia is sky high and he's deathly afraid of someone finding his conduct eccentric; he uses a hand flattened up against a wall to guide him into a cut-out threshold of a door, his back meeting the door of the apartment building before he braces onto Pru and slides to his bottom.

He pulls his knees to his chest and drops his forehead to his kneecaps in an effort to slow his heart and manage his breathing; his body both on fire and fallen into a weak fissure in the ice of a frozen lake. He wonders how many times the two of you have crossed paths before or just missed one another - if ever - and how many times he's made the mistake of blocking the world out around him with the large pad of headphones, his eyes downcast and trained on the scuffed toes of his shoes as you sat on the other side of a train car or slipped past him as you walked down a busy sidewalk in the opposite direction.

He finds it obscenely frustrating that his dreams never once showed him a clue as to your whereabouts; he's always assumed that if you were even real that you must have lived on the exact opposite side of the planet. His premonitions of you tended to take place inside of unfamiliar homes and apartment buildings, shops and streets that were unrecognizable to the agoraphobic bubble of a world that he'd created for himself and he could kick himself for not considering the possibility of searching for you in his own city.