Blowing Smoke (Harry Styles)

Chapter 46

A beautiful summer turned into an autumn, the green leaves drying into various shades of crimson and auburn. And an autumn hid underneath the blanketing snow of winters harsh winds and weather. While people lived their lives, grew six months older, I was malnourished and abused, seeming to age fifty years older. While others celebrated in victory for the Sea Hawks, I was talking to myself in the lonesome barn of gold. I lived on my own, wondering what life was bringing others outside of my wooden prison. Solitude was a scary thing, as I have learned, something that is used as a form of torture or punishment in prisons, and something that would make you want to blow your brains out of your skull with a handgun. It made you feel detached from other human life, as if God had made everyone else one big family that could converse and contact each other in some way, expect for me who was locked down underground in the middle of nowhere. I couldn’t find happiness in things. I couldn’t find sadness. I couldn’t fight anger. I couldn’t find laughter. I couldn’t find smiles. I couldn’t find that warmth that spread throughout my stomach like warm pomegranate tea that Harry’s kisses gave me. I couldn’t find which thoughts were real and which were imaginary. But which was most hard to realize was that I couldn’t find love anymore. It was as if all of those emotions and those feelings dissolved out of me and seeped through the cracks between the log walls of the barn, gone.

In the six months that I was left alone, I had been upgraded to having only one hand handcuffed to the hot pipe. And then I had been upgraded to move freely about the barn, which was locked tight. Once a month, on my period date, I was taken inside the house for a warm shower, to shave my legs and underarms, and given a clean pair of knickers. My beatings had been reduced from three times a day to once a week, and yet I was still filmed. I was given a bucket to expel my waste in, because I produced much more waste than before since my meal had also been upgraded from one slice of a bread a day to peanut butter and jam sandwich in the morning and a hot bowl of soup for dinner. I was also given a parka to wear over Rose’s jeans and my Westminster shirt which Dee had washed for me. I had been working out as best I could in the barn of hay, jogging on the spot, doing sit-ups and push ups, doing pull ups on a wooden log that ran horizontally across the roof of the barn. I had developed some muscle back onto my body.

I sat up on the high stack of hay, which I had climbed up to the top bails eight feet off the ground. My legs swung absentmindedly as I stared at the barn wall in front of me which let sun seep through the small cracks between the logs that made up the wall during the day. But it was night. So I had to wait for the racoons to attempt to crawl into the barn, but I would have to scare them away.

I hummed quietly to myself, pursing my lips as I did so. The song wasn’t written before, nor hummed or sung since it was merely a figment of my imagination, but it was beautiful to me. The lyrics were non-existent yet some of the most talented works that I have ever heard. I curled and uncurled my toes to the beat of my song, feeling a neutral, which was much better than the usual negative feeling that I have build up inside of me.

The racoon began to sneak in through the crack between the big barn doors and the floor, which I sadly couldn’t fit out of.

"Hey!" I shouted to it, making it go alert.

I picked up the bail of hay beside me, which was pretty heavy. And threw it at the racoon, making it shriek and sneak out of the barn, leaving me alone in the quiet of my deep and heavy breathing.

I ran my palm over my forehead, pulling my overgrown baby hairs out of the way of my vision. My hair, usually just grazing my waist, was now at my belly button height, which bothered the shit right out of me. I constantly wrapped it up in a ballerina bun, holding it together with a strange elastic that I made out of a piece of straw.

I sighed and tightened my khaki coloured parka tighter around my body in attempt to keep it warm. My ribs ached against the pressure of my tight parka from all of the abuse that it had received.