Aerial

The Finale // Part One

You made your bed, now lie in it.

Inside of that large, white five-story building, past the blue trim and reflective windows, there are squeaky, polished marble floors. Shiny, pearly and reflective; depressingly quiet and brutally loud all-at-once. High heels click and clack and click and clack while patients lurch uncomfortably in half-drugged-out stupors, tubes shoved up their noses as red Jell-O hardens on their bedside tables. Their wallets scraped clean of savings. Distressed family members linger in waiting rooms with folded newspapers in hand, a blunt pencil with a dull eraser held to last week's crossword, but they're not focused on the clues. The clues are an attempted distraction to anxiety; black-and-white boxes that contain no gray area in their design. The only problem with anxiety is that there are no inherent distractions for it because it vibrates just outside of you, all along every inch of skin, trapping you inside of its cage with birds frantically pecking at your bones for a breath of freedom.

Freedom lies within certainties and sometimes there are no certainties. So, what happens then?

Wandering obsession?

Cherry.

Inside of that large, white five-story building, past the blue trim and reflective windows, there are unsettling questions that pair with equally unsettling answers. The questions of what happened to me and who am I now and what's next, the kinds of questions that everyone dreads but is forced to evaluate at some point. The kinds of questions that people usually get the opportunity to ask themselves or their friends and family with some sort of memory of how they got where they are, armed with those inquiries.

Today, Harry doesn't have that privilege.

The hum from the neon sign that cleanly hangs several feet over the automatic sliding doors buzzes through Harry's wide-open van windows, cerulean and taut, high-pitched and hair-raising, memorable and not.

Mercy Valley Medical.

Dried, caked blood stings beside a small open wound in his cuticle. An old habit that creeps around when Harry's stress is at his highest; digging at tender skin until it becomes a hangnail and then picking at the hangnail until it hurts to touch and then tearing the hurting flesh from his finger with his teeth until it's even more tender than it was to begin with.

He runs his thumb over the callouses permanently etched into his palms; the ones that he helped cultivate when he first started out in the circus by using the secret industry technique of slipping into the bathroom after practice and pissing on the bloody open wounds rubbed raw by the trapeze bar. The salt and acids in urine helps to heal open blisters quicker and creates a leather quality to the skin in order to improve grip. It was something Indy had suggested to him right off the bat and advice that he'd shelled out to you when you'd bellyached about the pain after your first day on the giants. He took odd pride in the fact that you didn't seem appalled or squeamish as he assumed you might have been, but rather trusted his guidance and listened with perfectly unruffled feathers. With impartial tolerance. With gratitude.

With annoying innocence.

It made sense to him in hindsight, though; he'd figured you'd seen your fair share of atrocity each time you pulled off a pair of pointe shoes and inspected your bloody toes after rehearsals or practice for years as a professional ballet dancer. The result of beauty is pain, after all. More often than not.

Physically and emotionally.

Within the mayhem of his now-trashed van, Harry was unlucky in his search for another pack of Crush cigarettes, so he stopped at a corner market for a fresh carton on the way to the hospital. Even through his rose-tinted sunglasses, the flickering fluorescent lightbulbs nipped at his eyes as if he were a newborn seeing unnatural lighting for the first time. And for the first time that he could remember, none of the snacks shelved neatly in meticulously quaint rows with flashy labels seemed appealing. Not even the peanut butter.