North Road {HS}

25. Harry

It was all a bit of a blur. I remember knocking out that twat Joshua Winters in a boxing match and winning ten dollars. I remember whistling as I walked down to the dock pub for a quick drink before the football match. I remember spending all the money I won and being drunk by three and I remember the inexplicable pull I felt toward North Road while everyone else made one last frantic effort to pledge colors for the football match.

But I was sure I'd missed the match as I climbed out onto the roof from the old attic bedroom that had become mine and Pierce's home for over half a year now. Drunk and meditative I watched the sun set over the bay and wondered where the siren pull of that house on the hill came from. It seemed to me a lighthouse of sorts that beckoned strangers in to a life they hadn't hoped to have. I thought of Pierce and the years we had spent together and the way he had followed me here, to this house. To home. He had found everything he had ever hoped for and though my heart was happy for him a little part of me envied him and another part of me broke with the thought that eventually we'd be inseparable no longer.

Art wasn't here. That was evident. And it could be months or years before news came on his whereabouts or well-being allowing us to put his ghost to sleep with the thousands of others who were wallowing through mud to their afterlives somewhere in France. But Art had been the impetus, the inspiration. Everything I, and even Pierce, had never known we'd longed for. His tales had led us here. To each of us in the dark, dank nightmare of the trenches they'd seemed like fairytales where Monday mornings arrived on the notes of sharp, bright arpeggios being practiced, egging the sun to rise and rival their cheeriness. Where children laughed around a dimly lit kitchen table right in the midst of heart break. Where women grew strong, being watered with steady spring rains and sunsets on the bay- riddled with those small little holes pierced through tin lanterns by heartbreak that make the light shine through them and dance all the more beautifully. Where plain, grey dresses against the backdrop of a dingy old barn became the most beautiful sight I'd ever seen. I was hopelessly, madly in love with it all.

But I was drunk and none of that mattered.

So when I heard the sound of children giggling and being herded in the street I remained at my perch. And when I heard the commotion below as the prepared an evening meal to picnic on the veranda I kept my eyes set on the stars over the water. Finally, as the house grew quiet and the rustling of a girl in a nightdress slipping out the window behind me caught my attention, I examined my knuckles -still bloody from today's fight- and wished I was drunker and that the ten dollars I'd spent didn't feel all but comfortably worn off.

But when she turned to face me and her hair was wild and in the moonlight she looked freer than I'd ever seen her I wondered if it was really North Road I was in love with. And I don't know if it was the alcohol in my veins or the pain in her eyes that made me somehow simultaneously feel the overwhelming need to both run away and draw closer, but I knew I needed to choose one if I ever wanted to breath freely again. If I ever wanted to see the water on a stormy day and see anything but her eyes or hear the opening keys to any love song and not wonder how she would have played it.

And so there, on the roof, I kissed the only girl who could rival the moonlight- the moonlight which had been my lover for years now, my respite in the depths of my nightmares- and once again my idea of home changed forever.
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Dead.
Me- the queen of run-on sentences- will be back with and update soon, very soon. Promises.
Love you all.