High Noon [H.S]

make me feel like lightning

'I've been playing dead my whole life and I get this feeling whenever I feel good, it'll be the last time, but I feel something when I see you, now. I feel something, when I see you.'

The words of Phoebe Bridgers drift through my room, her discography on repeat for the whole of this morning. I was too preoccupied to change it, too busy with whatever my mind had lied itself into thinking was necessary work that absolutely needed to be done to do anything other than that. In this particular case, said work was organizing the shit out of every corner of my room, leaving no stone (or in my case, book) unturned.

And the thing was, organization wasn't really a skill I had ever picked up on nor was it something I chose to ever actively participate in during whatever free time I had. I've never once thought to myself 'let's do some organizing since I have some time to kill. That sounds like fun'. It didn't— It didn't sound like fun at all, but at this point, my mind would probably rather do just about anything to keep busy from other things. Like realizing I was falling for Harry type of other things, so organizing it was.

'If you're a work of art, I'm standing too close,' Phoebe's words echo through my four walls, mocking and loud, just as I'm throwing out a bunch of first year papers into a rubbish bag. 'I can see the brush strokes.'

My right arm falls to my side in annoyance, the sound of skin slapping skin echoing through the room. Of course she had a song that mentioned art that just had to play at this very second. It was like the universe was taunting me, letting me know that no matter what I did, the thoughts of Harry would still be there. There was no way to get rid of them.

"I'm trying to occupy my mind here, Phoebe. Do you mind?" I shout out to no-one, scoffing loudly and crumpling the papers more forcefully into the bag. It was almost overflowing and the plastic was stretched out so thin that one more item would probably tear it, but I still shove whatever I can in there.

The bag was a metaphor for my brain at this point. One more thought from exploding.

It takes me ten more minutes to finish throwing out whatever I can muster and I move on to organizing all my notebooks and textbooks from school that laid haphazardly across my desk. There's no order in to which I stack them, but somehow I'm left with one of the novels I read for English last and when I go to pick it up, something falls flat on my desk.

The red and black pamphlet from Seth's show stares back at me as if to say, good try. I reluctantly pick it up, thumbing through it gently til I get to the last page. Harry's name stares back at me from under the Special Thanks section and I swallow thickly.

My mother Barbara Prescott once told me that there were three major stages to falling in love. The first was realization. The second was fear. And the last step was acceptance.

I'd moved past stage one fairly quickly— realization. The part where my head and heart finally agreed on a term for what they were both feeling. The part where I could finally, albeit reluctantly admit it to myself. But I was currently stuck on stage two; fear. I didn't think I was going to be leaving that anytime soon.