Harry & Catalina's paths align as they make their own individual journey of healing. Both grieving the loss of parents, they travel to fulfill the dream road trip their parents never got to have.
The final destination, Italy.
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📍 Little Cottage in Dover - 2020
We laid sprawled out on the floor with a map Harry bought at the petrol station on the way home. We didn't have an ounce of actual food around us, nothing but soda, chocolate, candy and crisps. Bits of flavored dried meat seemed to be our main sustenance, well mine at least.
Harry wasn't joking around when he said we would map this entire trip out. We had my mothers diary, his stepfather's old notebook and my water color pens to help us map it all out. I was surprised by how precise Harry was with everything, making a legend at the bottom of the map; blue stars for his stepfather, red circles for my mum. He used this to mark every place they both had wanted to visit and the immediate conclusion he came to was; our parents were dreamers with no real sense of direction.
The places they wanted to visit were everywhere along the map and though not impossible, we agreed we had to draw up a guide that didn't involve too much backtracking and roundabouts. As we planned Harry spoke in concrete details and plans, but in my mind everything was still up in the air. I couldn't figure out a way to wrap my mind around the idea of continuing the trip with him.
"....feels like fate."
It did feel like fate. I couldn't fight that.
I felt my lips permanently screwed into my right cheek, my gaze moving up to Harry. He was on his stomach across from me, one pen in his hand, the other behind his ear. He had eyebrows furrowed, his tongue between his teeth, muttering to himself every once in a while as he tried to figure out the best path. His eyes eventually looked up at me, his arm extending out so he could push my lips out of my cheek, causing me to giggle a bit.
"What's scaring you, Catalina?" He said, crossing his arms in front of him, tucking his hands under his armpits.
"Honestly, lying to my nonna is the main thing. A whole trip of lying about what I'm really doing, who I'm with. It's going to eat away at me." I said, pushing off the ground, sitting with my legs crossed in front of me.
"Respectfully, Catalina, what are you? Twenty five? Twenty six? You're a grown woman and you'll only be telling a partial lie. You'll tell the truth of where you are....just not who you are with. You can always tell her at the end." He said, giving me the smallest of smirks, raising an eyebrow as if he just gave me the final solution to all my problems.
I shook my head chuckling softly, "Twenty five, but, Harry, my nonna lost the only thing she has besides myself. You have to understand the guilt."
"Hmm," he nodded, moving his eyes to look down over the map, before glancing at me again. Pushing himself up to a seated position, he scooted closer to me, "What was your mum's name?" His words came softly, careful almost.
"Oh...um, Alessia, Alessia Sloane." I swallowed, my fingers reaching down to pick up her diary. I closed it, opening up the back cover, pulling out a small polaroid of her my dad had taken when they were dating, "She was a dream really.
