Aerial

The Thirty-First Chapter

It has crossed your mind to show up at his van and knock on his door, but somehow that kind of thing is much cuter when Harry does it.

In hindsight, the nerves you'd been experiencing made sense. It's almost as if you instinctually knew what was going to happen, that the entire scenario was about to blow up in your face like a bomb that keeps on exploding. And in the midst of it all the frantic emotion, you had forgotten to ask Harry if he was physically okay after that brawl. But you suppose it doesn't matter, you knew the answer. No. He's not okay. And wherever he is right now, he's probably still not okay. Or maybe even feeling worse than before, which makes you anxious beyond belief. You want to search for him so badly that your feet itch, but he distinctly asked for space and Harry doesn't say things he doesn't mean.

It's either perfect or rotten that Nettie is spending the night with Asher tonight, leaving you with an apartment so quiet that you could hear a pin drop in your pink-tiled bathroom all the way from the dimly-lit kitchen. The space to spastically act upon each reflex of panic has an element of private comfort that you enjoy, but the solitude of going through the motions without springing one of your hundreds of questions on another living soul just makes you sink deeper into loneliness. Are you depressed or just isolated? What are you supposed to do when distractions aren't doing their job?

You make a conscious effort to convince yourself that you haven't been completely deserted by everyone you love tonight, considering that is most likely your fear of abandonment chipping away at the intricate molding of your fragile mind. You'll never quite understand why fear has to be so loud in the first place, acting as a brick wall that stacks from the ground to the sky, curling a taunting finger in your direction and daring you to climb. That nosy, permeating fibber. No one ever invites fear along, but natural selection has placed it as the front-lines of all of their wars. Everything that you want seems to be just on the other side of fear and it would be a much easier fight if it didn't morph and move so quickly. It meets each one of your fresh navigation tactics with an even mightier shield, proving to you over and over again that it's your work to constantly outsmart it in order to move forward with anything in life. And it's exhausting.

The spiky little details are the ones that tend to cut you deepest: the pokes and prods and jabs interspersed with brutal silence when you and Harry had first met, the arctic blast of truth that breezed through your dressing room when he unveiled his horrific past, the unnatural hush of his injured body and brain as he lay motionless in a hospital bed, the defeated-but-hopeful tick of his mouth each time he'd hand you a cluster of sunflowers and ask about your breakfast, a plane of glass across his eyes when he recounted how it felt to be raised by a disparaging parent, the way his fingers wrapped around Tex's strained neck in desperate anger, the flail of his frantic limbs as people tried to subdue his wild turbulence with all their might, the curl of his lips as he scorched you alive with heartbroken French, spatters of blood on his clothes and his face and the sizzling pavement, his stolen confessions and his voluntary ones, the rawness of forming bruises on his eye socket and jaw once his skin had been wiped clean. The feeling of his lips sealing a resolute kiss into your forehead when he told you that he needed freedom tonight. The slip of his hands through yours as he backed away. The sorrowful way he navigates his emotional and physical pain. The sorrowful way he navigates yours. His secure grasp on your heart. His eyes. Him.

Dark chocolate bonbons. Key lime saltwater taffy. Cotton candy. Hearts. Sunshine.

How does anyone exist without him?

Wherever Harry is, you know that he's thought himself in and out of so many circles that he's likely a dizzy, head-spun mess. A consideration flits by and you force it out before it can gain too much speed; Riff did mention that him and Tex were meant to meet at Hound Dogs. Would Harry go so far as to knock back a few beers with the steam of anger rising under his shoes and show up there in search for them with the intention of continuing their brawl or even worse, ending it all together? Is he all alone in his van like he said he would be, slugging Pearl after Pearl, playing intoxicated versions of his favorite songs on his guitar and cursing the idiotic position you've put him in – after laying out the rawest possible version of himself for so many weeks?