More than a Melody (H.S) ON HOLD

53

fifty three

Tonight I will be dead.

I will be a statistic. A grieving memory. A lost friend. A funeral arrangement.

I wished, more than anything, that I could lose track of time. That the days would blend together and I could guess the hours. I have all the days and all the time now, there was no need to keep track. It was as if I was a child again. Not having to rely on calendars and schedules but my own selfish interests. But I knew I left on a Sunday, arrived on a Monday, and it was now Tuesday.

And tonight I will be dead.

It hasn't fully hit me yet. I've spent the last three hours tying beads to yarn because Clo offered to show me how to make a dream catcher. Since the one Nev gifted me was left behind.

"Loop the ends so the beads don't fall," Clo instructs, braiding and tying her own for reference. Harry dices tomatoes in the kitchen for lunch. It was hot. It's been hot the last few days. There was a little man-made pool across the yard, one framed with hardened clay and a smooth stone bottom. It was hardly very deep, and for this reason not even the shade could keep it cool. Harry and I jumped in for five minutes but the temperature resembled bath water.

Now we drank lemonade and ate frozen peaches to cool down. Harry was trying to distract me from the thought of my imminent death. He told tacky jokes and wrote down silly lyrics on a pad of paper, reciting them back to us and asking whether he should sing it at the winery. Clo laughed so hard, air blew from her mouth and knocked a few beads off the table.

I noticed, in between the moments where Clo was hunched over from laughter, that Harry would slip a sheet of the yellow pad paper into a notebook set along the edge of the countertop. I hadn't ever seen it before but it resembled the ones Harry bought me for Christmas a year ago, only far more worn and each page was wrinkled and curled from use. I assumed this is where he kept the rough drafts of his music, scribbled in works and inspirations he held onto but never fully exposed. And I felt guilty for wanting to pull back the pages and read every little thought he's ever written because I knew it was an invasion of his privacy. I wanted to ask, "Harry, can you go pick some more peaches for me and Clo?" and then take a quick glimpse inside but I wouldn't. I couldn't. I would hate if Harry, or anyone, did that to me.

So I chew the last bite of my frozen peach and try to steady my hands enough to finish the ends of my dream catcher.

"Do you think it will help?" Harry asks and it's nearly midnight. We're sitting beneath a canopy, the moonlight making the grass stems resemble highlighted backdrops in a painting. The air is cooler, coupled with a fleeting coastal breeze, and every speckle of life around us smells like summer rain and ripe lemons. It was perfect, this place, far too perfect to properly grasp. And all I could think about was how much I wished to share this perfect world with Danny and Delilah, Vince and Miles.

"The dream catcher? Probably not, but it kept me busy."

Harry swirls around a pooling of wine until the glass becomes a wall of red that nearly spills over. He's still wearing his cherry stem ring. I set mine inside of a carved wooden box in the bathroom. As silly as it sounds, I'm afraid to lose it.

Harry is wearing a watch, he checks it every now and again but whenever I glance over too, he flicks his wrist over and clears his throat and diverts the conversation.

"Don't," he says, "don't run through the hours in your head. You'll drive yourself mad."

I huff, "you're doing it right now, it's hard not to notice."