Aerial

The Thirty-First Chapter

Do you think we ever fully let shit go?

Add that to the extensive list of questions for your death bed. After the course of today's events, you've got a brand new stock-pile of them. And throughout the past hour that you've spent sweeping your apartment with a frayed corn whisk broom with your hair wrapped up in a silken headscarf, the one piece of stubborn dust that you can't seem to scrub is the unsettling concern for your sunny boyfriend's well-being at the moment. The tragic morning that Tex showed up at your door to break the news of Harry wiping out on his surfboard is stuck at the very forefront of your irrational, traumatized brain. Every so often you find yourself pausing your manic cleaning session to open the front door, expecting to see a heartbroken Tex there, waiting to deliver another round of unbearable pain that you're not equipped to handle again.

Harry said that he would call you and since he never says things that he doesn't mean, you've been dragging your telephone all around your apartment tonight waiting for the jarring ring to slice through your gloomy, persistent jitters. It never does, but that doesn't stop you from glancing over at its lifeless receiver every ten minutes or so. 

Listen, everything you're feeling about me is valid, and it's also not real. Does that make sense?

The sensation of fear that you're experiencing is valid, the fear itself is not real. You're worried that Harry is going to hurt you again, but he's not going to hurt you again. This is probably the most succinct, engaging, mirror-flashing breakdown of anxiety you've ever heard and sometimes you truly wonder if you would've grown this intensely and this suddenly without the sharp beam of light poking holes in your curtains tremendously early each morning.

All you can hope now is that he proves your valid sense of fear wrong.

Each new sunrise leads to a new discovery; one about yourself and one about the person whom you've become so heavily involved with. The fuzzy little details are the ones that tend to soothe you most: how he flosses his teeth with his hips pressed up against the sink before bed, the way he nuzzles his cheek into your palm whenever you touch his face, the taste of his mouth after a cotton candy puff and the taste of his mouth after a bite of green apple, the peel of your sleeping mask at dawn followed by an immediate hoarse hello, how he plays air drums with a cigarette pinched between his lips when discordant rock records spin circles in his van, initiating Rock Paper Scissors to score things that are already his, the jump of his adam's apple when he tosses his head back in generous laughter, the pop of his cheek when he scarfs an enormous bite of food, how he dances when no one is watching and how it's exactly the same as when the world is watching, the smell of his golden neck after he's swam in the ocean and bathed in the sun. The feeling of his sculpted back against your stomach when you press up against it, slipping your hands under his warm shoulders and sponging a kiss into the top notch of his spine. The weight of his head after he drops it back to rest on your collarbone. The perfect way that he teases you. The perfect way that he pleases you. His lips on your throat. His hands. Him.

It's just after one o'clock in the morning, on your first night apart since your lips locked at Temptations, and you miss him.

His energy just takes up so much space in a room that when it's gone, it feels like someone has sucked the air out along with it. There are a lot of shadows in your small apartment without sunshine in every corner and your kitchen counter looks all wrong without a tepid carton of orange juice and a half-eaten sleeve of Ritz crackers resting on it. You've scooped up and washed all of his stray socks and undershirts. Six heart-shaped cigarette filters lay crushed in the ashtray on your coffee table. Cherry-scented candles burn in every corner for some semblance of light. Your bed sheets have eternally been steeped in caramelized strawberry-vanilla sugar tea. You have managed to survive your entire life sleeping alone, but now it feels as though you couldn't possibly bear it.