Nowhere In Particular // H.S.

Forty-Five: Where It Ends

There's a thought that your life flashes in front of your eyes before you die, that every moment you loved and every moment you may have regretted quickly plays through your mind before you close your eyes for that final time. I can't tell you if this is true or not, because I've never even been close to dying... but I feel like this flash of my life just happened to me.

I see my mom, much younger than she is now, running around the kitchen as I eat syrupy pancakes and she tries to explain to me how it's my first day of kindergarten. I see Pat, Blair and me squished into the back of the station wagon we had as kids, my parents in the front singing to an old song as we drive to the mountains and Pat keeps poking me in the arm. I see myself in 5th grade when Laurel and I got in trouble for passing notes in class, and we had to explain to our teacher why we were talking about Trevor King's butt... it was because he had a cute one.

Little memories of my life play in my head, starting from the early days when I was a kid stumbling through the world and passing through the embarrassing preteen era to end just about where I am now.

And then Harry's there.

There's the first moment I saw him and couldn't help but stare, knowing he was someone special but not realizing what that meant for me. I see myself waking up in his lap and feeling this instant comfort, this feeling of wholeness that I'd never experienced before. I see his smile when he says something he thinks is funny, and how it grows when I actually laugh even if it isn't. I see his hands on my waist, on my knee, in my hair... how he'd hold onto me when we'd sleep and his quiet breaths against the back of my neck.

I see his face as he convinced me to jump in the pool with him, me standing in my underwear with a tipsy mind and a nervous stance. The smile he had as he waded in the water, waving me to jump in with him... how he felt against me when I was pressed against the pool wall, how I was sure he was going to kiss me and then he didn't.

I see when he left to go to Vegas but turned around because he felt it was a mistake. I see every little stop we made along the way, waking up with him and never knowing what the day would consist of but always knew it would be good.

I see the downhill slide with him, when Harry started feeling sad more than he felt happy... when the image he was trying to hold was fading away and I could see more of the pain he was trying to keep away from us. I see those moments of hopefulness in the more trying times, where Harry wanted it to be okay... where he wanted us to be okay.

All of these little moments are replaying in my head.

To start over, that's what Harry wants, to forget about the hard times and to move forward... but that would also mean forgetting about the good times too.

Harry, I'm not sure that's what I want.

It feels like time has stopped with these words, that Harry's in shock and that I'm not going to make it much longer at this rate either.

From the look on Harry's face I feel like he's doing a very similar thing as I am, at least the memories of us are replaying over and over in his head as he's tries to figure out when it all went wrong, when it became unfixable. His eyes are wide and moving back and forth quickly, his nervous hand in his hair, pulling tightly as his legs bounce up and down.

"Greta," he says my name and I feel my heart sink, hearing how broken up his voice is. "I-,I-, I-," he tries to keep going but he can't, shaking his head as he looks down from me.

It hurts to see him react this way. It makes me feel fidgety and I find it hard to sit here and watch him. My legs move to stand up, needing to widen the space between Harry and I before it all becomes too hard, but I feel his hand on my knee before I even have the chance to move away.