Heavy Heart

The first thing Daria saw when she opened her eyes was an unfamiliar tiled ceiling, the methodic beeping of a heart monitor echoing through the room. The steady beat gave a jolt as her heart jumped, realizing where she was. She was at the hospital. Immediately, she sat up in bed glancing around the room. All washed white, thin blankets, her body covered in a hospital gown, Olivia napping restlessly in the chair in the corner.

“Liv,” Daria mumbled, her voice cracking for not being used. “Liv, get up.”

Olivia jerked awake, her long honey hair tousled on the side she’d been sleeping on, eyes bewildered but still tinged with sleep. “Oh thank goodness,” she breathed in her lilting accent, reaching forward to press the green nurse button on the side panel of Daria’s bed.

“What happened?” Daria asked. Her head was rattling with a splitting headache, her ears ringing incessantly. Olivia twisted her face in confusion, moving to sit on the edge of the bed.

“You don’t remember?”

“The last thing I remember is reading a letter I found from my dad,” Daria murmured. Her head was pounding and instinctively her hand went to the source. But when her fingers touched her temple, they were met with the jagged edges of surgical thread, having stitched up a four-inch long gash in her head. She gasped, turning to Olivia with wild eyes.

“What happened?” she demanded.

“Harry and I got to the dorm just in time to see you pass out and fall out of bed,” Olivia explained, running her finger under Daria’s eye and coming back with a smear of left over makeup. “You hit your head on the leg of the desk chair pretty hard and were out for a while. Harry drove us to the hospital and the whole time I was trying to get you to talk to me, you just kept talking about the ballet.”

Tears sprung back into Daria’s eyes at Olivia’s words, the memory of what the Japanese puzzle box contained coming back to her all too clearly. She nodded her head gravely, signaling Olivia to continue.

“When we got to the emergency room, you kept fighting against the nurses,” she proceeded, her eyes sad and full of apology. “You were absolutely hysterical. So they had to sedate you. The whole ordeal was pretty dramatic. You lost a lot of blood. Our room is a mess.”

“How long have I been out for?” she asked, her voice shaking from the weight of the details.

“Only an hour,” Olivia clarified. “I’m surprised that you’re awake already, I think they used some pretty heavy stuff. You were freaking out.”

Daria sighed, pressing her head deeper into the hospital-grade pillow propped behind her. She couldn’t help but gingerly finger the stitches lining her hairline, pressing harder to see just how much they would hurt. The whole situation was just so blown out of proportion, the reality that escaped her mind seeming to out of control to be true. Daria would never fight against a nurse when she needed help. And Harry had been there to see it all.

But he was nowhere to be found.

“Where’s Harry?” Daria asked, her tone panicked and urgent. “Why isn’t he here?”

Olivia sighed, taking Daria’s hand and removing it from the gash, holding it in hers. “He’s just downstairs getting something to drink for us,” she explained. “He’ll be up in a minute, I’m sure. He was by your side the whole time.”

Daria’s emotions were a mixture of embarrassment and relief. Thank goodness Harry had been there to get her to the emergency room, and her stomach gave a little turn at the thought of him being by her side, holding her hand as she got stitched together at the seams. But on the same token, she was absolutely mortified that he had seen her at her lowest low, the point where she hit very rock bottom. She thought they had jumped that hurdle when they fought about his friendship at Cara.

“Daria,” Olivia murmured, her tone suddenly urgent. “They’re talking about putting you on medication. For your panic.”

All the hopes Daria had built up about getting better suddenly were jerked out from underneath her like a tablecloth beneath a delicate golden place setting.

“No,” Daria protested breathlessly, her hands beginning to shake. Her eyes welled with tears, her head splitting with the pain of her headache. She wondered if it were possible to just split her head back open to release the pressure and seal it up with stitches like the ones in her forehead – if only it could be that easy. If only anything could be that easy.

“Daria, maybe it’s for the best – ”

The nurse came through the door at that moment, cutting Olivia off with her perky, preachy introduction. Olivia left the room to give them some privacy and hopefully track down Harry while the nurse ran Daria’s vitals. All along, Daria ran an internal soliloquy, tossing and turning over the thoughts that overwhelmed her head.

She thought she had hit rock bottom already. She thought the worst had already come. But no. This was much worse. This time, she was going to have to tell Harry about her panic disorders. This time, she was going to have to come clean. And the thought of that petrified her. Almost as much as the thought of medication petrified her.

She’d worked so hard and had come so far. She managed through every day with nothing but her little online journal, her archive of emotions. Things had been turning up on an every day basis, and then… and then she hit a patch of ice and the slope was only downhill from there. And her father was always at the end of the path, reaching out for her hand.

She was always going to be chasing after the memory of her father, always doing the same puzzle over and over in hopes of reaching him. But even though she’d unlocked that puzzle, discovered the secrets he’d left for her inside, she didn’t really reach him. He was gone. It was over before it even started.

The nurse left Daria after a while, realizing that Daria wasn’t going to talk back. The room was silent except for the sound of the IV running, the heart monitor beeping, and the ringing of the screaming headache in her ears. So that was what rock bottom felt like. The stitches in her head.

“Hey,” a smooth voice murmured from the door, and Daria raised her eyes to see Harry standing in a soft blue polo up beneath a heather grey blazer, his legs belted into dark wash skinny jeans. She resisted a sigh at the sight of him, all dressed up for the date we were supposed to be on. His eyes looked tired, exhausted from the worry she must have caused him. He licked his lips as a pretense for what happened next, full and pursed in determination.

In three short strides, he crossed the room; catching Daria up in his arms and pressing a hard, passionate kiss to her lips. She melted in his arms, kissing him back with all the strength she had in her. The entire time her head pounded, but the intensity of Harry’s lips on hers drowned it out. She was safe in his arms, always so safe in his arms, and that’s what mattered.

“Don’t ever scare me like that again,” he murmured into her hair, planting thankful kisses up and down her neck. “Please, never again. Never ever again.”

She moved over in the bed, making room for him to crawl in next to her. Gingerly, he arranged his body against hers, running his fingers through her hair away from the gash on her forehead. She cringed a little at his touch, nervous for the pain that would inevitably follow. But Harry was careful with her. Harry was always so careful with her, so she never had to worry.

“I thought you were dead for a second,” he muttered below his breath, words weighted with tears. “I saw you fall on the ground, and all the blood… I carried you out of there and prayed the whole time you would be okay.”

“Harry…” she trailed off, not knowing what to say. Her heart audibly skipped a beat, the monitor giving her away. The thought of him being so concerned for her made her weak in the knees.

“You’re so important to me, Daria,” he continued, running his finger lightly around the edges of her chapped, dehydrated lips. “I… I…”

His voice faltered inexplicably, his words completely lost between them. Instead, he closed the gap with his lips. They both lost track of the thought in each other, the warm breath between kisses clouding their vision entirely. When Harry kissed her nothing else mattered, and when he pulled away all she wanted was more.

“I’m sorry,” she replied softly, flicking her gaze his slightly parted lips and his intense green eyes. “I didn’t mean to ruin our date. You’re all dressed up and I managed to end up in the hospital.”

Harry laughed through a sigh, wrapping his arms around her waist and pulling him close to her. They lay face to face in her hospital bed, chests pressed against each other, legs tangled in a mess only distinguishable by Daria’s bare, skinny pair. He kissed the end of her nose, and then again in the spot between her eyebrows.

“It’s okay,” he hummed, draping his arm around her waist. “My manager has season tickets, we can always go next time.”

“Season tickets to what?” Daria questioned.

“The London Ballet,” Harry replied casually, his eyes completely innocent.

Daria sighed. Of course. Harry had a way of making her dreams come true, and Daria had a way of finding ways to ruin it. She was quiet for a while, letting them breathe together and nothing else, her heartbeat resounding through the room through the heart monitor. Harry traced small patterns on her bare hip, having edged the hospital gown just high enough to reach. His touch sent chills up her spine, second only to the way he was looking at her.

“Daria,” he murmured, his lips forming her name in the most delicious way. Daria loved the way he said her name.

“Harry,” she replied, pressing her hand to his strong, broad chest. She could see the outline of his muscles below his collarbone through the part in his unbuttoned polo.

“What’s going on?” he asked, his voice low and intentional. His gaze refused to break from her, solemn like it was the most pressing issue in the world. And then she realized that perhaps, in their little world between them, it was.

“What do you mean?” she questioned, feeling rather small. There wasn’t much she could do to avoid it, to make it go away.

Harry’s solemn look remained as he reached into the pocket of his blazer and retrieved a small something in his hand. He held it out for Daria to see, revealing the perfectly imperfect pearl from her dad’s Japanese puzzle box.

“What’s going on?" he repeated.

Daria plucked the pearl from his hand with careful fingers, pressing it to her lips once more. The surface had warmed in Harry’s pocket for as long as he’d been holding onto it, still smooth as glass. It felt as though the weight of the world was resting on her chest, constricting her breath. She could be dead for all she knew – maybe heaven felt like a whitewashed hospital room, lying in bed with Harry. The heartbeat on the monitor proved otherwise.

“I figured out the puzzle box,” she replied finally, rolling the pearl around against her fingertips. She noticed her nails had a thin layer of blood crusted around them, start against her pale skin. Harry watched her as she absently toyed with the pearl, running it against her teeth to feel the tiny bits of grain.

“I saw,” he murmured. “You nearly crushed it when you fell out of bed. There’s just some blood on it now, but I tried to clean most of it off.” He gestured to a table in the corner of the room where the puzzle box lay, still completely undone for Harry and Olivia not knowing the pattern to put it back together.

“Thank you,” she murmured. There weren’t many words left to describe all the things she was feeling all at once. Just that weight. She had to carry that weight.

“I didn’t realize this was an every day thing,” he continued gingerly. “I didn’t know that you were still working through this, after all this time.”

“Of course I am Harry,” she replied, a little bit of an indignant tinge to her voice. “You don’t just get over something like this. I was still holding onto him with that box, that last little piece of himself he left for me. Working with the box was like talking with him again, and I miss that every day. And I think figuring it out once and for all was enough to snip me apart at the seams.”

Harry was silent for a moment, contemplating her every feature with furrowed brows. She didn’t know how to articulate herself any better than that, just telling the facts she knew he would understand. He had never lost someone the way Daria lost her father. He’d never been left staring at half-finished crossword puzzles in the Times, waiting at the window for him to come home that Tuesday afternoon. Staring at the ceiling of her bedroom, the star map they made together speckling her sight. Listening to “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” from September until July. There were no words to describe that feeling, and then the feeling of it being over all at once.

“I wish you would have told me,” he hummed, pulling her in to him so her head would rest on his chest, dark hair splayed out loosely on his bare collarbones. “I wish I would have known so I could help.”

“There isn’t any knowing with these things.” she replied. “There is and there is not, there is no in between.”

“That’s not true,” he argued. “I care so much about you, it’s probably insane. I want to help you, but I can’t when I don’t know anything is wrong. Next time something is going on, I want you to please let me help you.”

She knew soon she would have to tell him, and soon she would. But at that moment, with her head on his chest and his arms tight around her, things were as happy and safe as she could be. She was beginning to fall back asleep under the draught of medication, and before she could even reply, she was falling asleep to the sound of his heartbeat.

She dreamed that they were in a boat on the ocean with nothing but blue green sea for miles. Harry had a bottle of sand with a starfish inside, slowly rolling it in his hands so the spines appeared and disappeared. And then he kissed her.