Aerial

The Tenth Chapter

"Tex. What are you doing here?"

Everything that has occurred between last night and this morning has been spattered with little freckles of Harry's heartbreaking face. Not much has happened today considering the sun has just barely risen and your eyes are so tired that it hurts to move them around too quickly. But yet, Harry's glassy eyes and flared nostrils and little flecks of saliva have stained every single bit of thought you've kindled.

Pushing your sheets from your legs and hearing his confession echoing off the boundaries of your skull, washing your face in water from the golden swan faucet and remembering the death grip of his fingers when he tossed your arm away, brushing your teeth and feeling his hip bump against yours in jest, drinking a glass of water and hallucinating his cigarette butt swirling in the bottom of the receptacle, brewing a pot of tea and watching his apple core land on your lunch to scatter it into the grass, pushing softly scrambled eggs around in a pan and imagining the tears that saturated your neck as if begging for retribution.

I killed her. My best friend and the person who taught me everything I know.

Happy now?

Your breakfast sat cold and untouched on the coffee table just out of arm's reach. Everything was just out of arm's reach; Harry, the truth, the final drippy and pointy icicle that needed to fall in order to make room for everything to melt around you. The snowy and white world that comprised of your surroundings had disintegrated so quickly that you hadn't even stopped to realize just how picturesque and blanketed everything was until it's been maliciously absorbed back into the atmosphere and the earth.

Harry wasn't hiding a secret. He was hiding entire catacombs.

You pulled your legs into your chest and hovered your cup of tea just below your nose, allowing the steam from the herbal brew to open up your pores and swim inside of your mind. The moment you had deemed it an acceptable time to show up at someone's doorstep, you had planned to throw on whatever clothing you could find and knock on the door of his van in an attempt to make amends between the two of you. It didn't matter if you were the last person he'd wanted to see, your conscience was on fire with the weight of his admittance and if your conscience was on fire, his must have been smoldered to fine, black dust.

You're not immune to your share of trauma. Your upbringing was filled with a controlling, dominant father and an equally religious and timid mother. You promised yourself to do your part in revolutionizing the female stereotype and gender role by rising somewhere above the institution and focusing on your career and what makes you most happy. One too many women have chosen the route of suffocation-by-housewife, raising children and getting drunk on chardonnay by four in the afternoon because they were tired of doing what they were told. The pressure to have babies and provide a home for a man was extraordinary and one that your parents couldn't agree to stop harassing you about, so when you chose the path of professional dancer only to meet the cold, wooden floor with a decimated ankle, you could've sworn that you saw your life flicker to ashes before your eyes as the curtains slammed shut around you.

It was bad enough that the system of misogyny has been driven into the ground so deeply that the only way to fight it is by holding your breath and slowly digging your way out from underground, all the while ignoring ridicule and judgment, snickers and harsh words, snide comments and doubt. Now to find that the one person you've been fighting so hard against could care less about your struggles, but not because he's a self-centered egotistical prick like you'd always assumed, but because your trauma in no way compares to the absolute cryptic rubble of his life. There doesn't seem to be enough room for everyone's widespread and personal battles; The Civil Rights Movement, The Vietnam War. Everything is just so oppressive, deadly and costly. But not many things on earth can hold a candle to accidental murder.