Her Royal Highness

XXXV

Do you ever feel so lost, so completely detached from life, that you almost cant even tell the days are passing? You know they are, because no matter what personal drama, no matter what life changes you are facing, that is the one thing you can count on. That the days will come and go, and life will go on even if you don't feel as thought you can.

This was how I had felt for the last nine days. Nine of the longest, most empty, most numbing days of my life, all blending together in to one long scene of monotony.

I didn't know what to do. There were so many factors involved in that one day that I didn't even know how to begin to process it all. So many different aspects, all needing different solutions, all so completely opposite of each other.

But I felt too weak, too completely empty to even do anything about them. I thought about them, of course. That was all I really did as this time passed. Lay in my bed, and think. Endlessly think.

First, there was yet another betrayal by my mother. I knew her taste for my educational choices, both line of study and college, was sour. She cared for neither, as I figured and expected. I knew, when she said all the right things through gritted teeth in the days following my finding out about Ford and his relation to me, that it was all for show. She was a talented woman, my mother. She knew how to say what needed to be said. But there was nothing in her rule book about having to mean it.

So I really shouldn't have been that surprised to talk in and find the dean of St Andrews in my home. I maybe shouldn't have been surprised that she had gone ahead and suggested my preference to the school to him, and provided my transcripts. And I probably shouldn't have been dumbfounded at the fact that she honestly thought that her trick would work, that I would just cave to her will as I had time and time again.

But I was surprised. I was so completely shocked and lost at the fact that my own mother would go to such lengths. I mean, was my own choice so bad? Were my own desires so completely worthless to her that he felt she had to intervene so directly?

I didn't know, and I didn't care. Because I wasn't going to change my mind for her. I wasn't going to let her take this away from me; this first glimmer of hope I had to a future beyond these walls. I had been accepted to the school of my choice. To the program I wanted. I was going to do this, with or without her support.

Normally, I would immediately follow up that thought with 'because I have Harrys support'. But, in light of the changes between him and I from that same day, I could no longer think those words with any real sense of belief.

I was in no way prepared to deal with my thoughts on Harry. Both my own realization of exactly how I felt about him, and the way he had taken my statement of him being a release for me. That he truly believed he was nothing more than a replacement addiction.

Yes, I had turned to alcohol and drugs to cope. I used them as a mechanism of distraction, to make me feel nothing, to erase the pain and anger I felt at my life. The control held over me, the scrutiny and the nothingness. But Harry wasn't that. If anything, he was the opposite. He made me feel, he made me think. He made me want to be something, and actually work towards it. He was my catalyst for everything good that that I wanted, that I hoped for.

I turned to him when upset and lost because I loved him. Not because he was a replacement for my bad habits. But because he was so good, so clear and so real, that I didn't need or want those old coping mechanisms again.

That I loved him. That despite how we met, despite the reasons for his place in my life, and regardless of how we came to be as we were now, I loved the man more than I ever thought possible. I had never loved anymore before. I had never even considered the concept. It was another one of those corny tales you read about in novels of fiction and dramatic films. It was an intangible ideal, but not one of any truth. And certainly not one that I was capable of.