Afterlife: Redemption

49

HARRY

I concentrated on my breathing.

In.

Out.

In.

Out.

That was all I could do. Because I couldn't feel anything else.

My body felt completely detached from me. I couldn't feel any part of myself from the moment I returned home the day before. I couldn't feel the couch beneath me, the floor under my feet. I couldn't feel the tension in my shoulders, or even the glass in my hand.

My mind, the part of me that I expected to be in a complete and total torrent, was surprisingly empty. I was void of any thought. I should be thinking, right? I should be hearing all the things she said. All the confessions, all the connections and all the things that just destroyed my world all over again. I should be thinking about them, putting it all together, in some twisted form of repetition. As if I was living it all again.

But I wasn't. I wasn't thinking anything. I couldn't feel anything.

Except the pain in my chest.

After all the literary classics I had read, of all the novels, the short stories, the manuscripts. After everything I had taken in over the last five years, one theme always made me laugh.

Heart break. The actual feeling of your heart breaking, stabbing through your chest, splitting in two.

As a man who always stood by the fact that I, in fact, did not have a heart, I found this to be humorous whenever I would read that line. That the fact that an organ, one that didn't even have a single God damn thing to do with emotion, could feel pain in relation to loss, made no sense to me.

I hadn't felt it when my parents died. I knew my Nan had, or at least told me so. She had said the day of the funeral, after saying our final goodbyes, that it felt as though her heart was breaking in two. She said it through small sobs, little gasps, as I helped her tidy the kitchen as best I could, considering my own invalid state. I was still in a wheelchair, bumping in to things, including my Nan. But she didn't say anything. The only thing she said during the time it took to clean, was about her heart.

I didn't believe her at the time. I knew it was just a saying, something people always voiced as a way of expression. A coined term to equate a feeling, but not something that was actually true in any form.

But I believed her now. Sitting here, on this couch, staring ahead at the black TV screen with nothing playing, I believed her completely.

Because that was what I felt. Complete and total heart break. It was the only thing I did feel, this all consuming pain in my chest. I wondered, at one point, if this was why I felt nothing else. Why I couldn't even really form much thought, or feel my ass on the couch. Because ever nerve ended was now attached to my heart, and searing the pain through me. It felt like a constriction, a deathly tightening, mixed with burning, stabbing, and aching that never seemed to go away.

I had never experienced this feeling before in my life, and I swore to God if he took it away now, I would never ask for another thing. If anything, he owed me this. To take away the pain. Because he took away everything else.

I had felt this shock from the moment she told me. From the moment my haggard mind made the connection that maybe, just maybe, she was telling the truth. The moment I let the thought in, even for that moment, it was like a consumption She was telling the truth. He did it. Her brother was there. He killed my parents.

Once those thoughts were in my head, I needed to run. I needed to escape her. I never thought that would be possible, but I had to get the fuck away from her. I almost ran out her door, growling at her to never speak to me again, before racing out and onto the street.