Remember to Breathe

Older

When I woke up, I wasn't home, wasn't at the party I remember, can place myself in attending, but I was somewhere new. Somewhere bathed in shades of blue, hues of grey, and smatterings of black like running mascara in the light of day.

The ceiling was cracked, it was a sight I felt through each of my bones as if I had slept for months, hadn't moved even an inch for a single second.

Ashes settled in my lungs and I fought to breathe, to inhale, exhale, to exist when I felt as if I might fade away with the simplest puff of breath.

It took me a long time to realize you were there, leaning over me, eyes hazed and dim. There was something in the blue, something that remind me of the first time I saw you.

You asked me if I was breathing, if my heart was still beating. Deep in my chest I felt something, a rattling, whisping, thrumming, but no words came from my mouth.

A weak smile curled your lips, and you touched my feverish skin with your freezing fingertips.

You told me to relax, to keep breathing because it's okay to stay up but that you wanted me to come down. You said you needed me to, that you couldn't remember my name, but you knew my eyes, placed them with warm lattes, rainy nights under stoplights.

There was a light to your skin, warm despite being so, so delicately thin. You brushed a curl away from my face, let the conversation drift to things of outer space.

You spoke of falling stars, of dying light.

You tapped out constellations on your thighs, told stories of love under night skies.

You never quite finished the tales, let them spin, spin, spin until they failed with weak breaths, puffs of smoke in the fading light.

As my bones burned, my muscles ached, I asked you about the falling stars, what you meant when the words dripped from your lips.

With the faintest smile, the slowest flutter of eyelashes against freckled cheeks, you told me that we are the stars, just waiting for our lights to burn out.

But yours already has.

I hadn't meant to say the words out loud, to let those painfully bleak words fill the air, but you merely brushed your knuckles against my cheek.

"We all get older, Curly."

--
Harry Styles for the first time, feels like he might understand, that he might just know the boy with the blue eyes so pale and the smile so faint. The feeling of drowning, flying, falling, being able to breathe when there's really no air at all... It's intoxicating, numbing, loving, placating. He wonders how long this boy has been trying to find the surface, why this boy cares whether or not he makes the same mistake, or if to this boy it's even a mistake at all. He doesn't know why he's here, why he's in the home of this boy, but he doesn't want to leave, to abandon this suffocatingly mesmerizing person when it feels as if everyone else already has. He wants to stay, to know this boy for who he is -- who he was before something became too much, too much to handle, to keep fighting to breathe. Deep in his bones, he knows that he will probably never find the truth.