Heavy Heart

“Harry, would you let me in?” Daria urged into the speaker outside his gate, the paparazzi swarming behind her, snapping pictures of her every move. “I’m practically being assaulted out here.”

Upon being released from the hospital, Daria was handed a prescription the antidepressant Prozac, urged by Dr. Gupta to ‘please give it a try.’ She danced around it all week, staring at the bottle where it sat on her desk, hiding it carefully whenever Harry came to check up on her. Finally, before hopping on the train to London, she decided to try.

She couldn’t place a finger on her emotions afterward, perhaps because she didn’t have any emotions at all. The paparazzi were lapping at her like tidal waves outside Harry’s gate, and she had no sense of anxiety what so ever. Only the heavy weight of drowsiness and a lump of nausea in her stomach the size of a grapefruit.

Finally he buzzed her through, coming to the gate to greet her and to shoo the paparazzi away. “How many times do I have to tell you to leave her alone?” he demanded, sending a glare to the cameras. “What a sick lot you all are. Come on, love.”

He grabbed her by the elbow and Daria listlessly followed, only reinforcing her near catatonic state. A chill ran down her spine, through the bones in her quaking fingers. Something wasn’t right, she knew that much. The normal buzz of excitement she got when she was with Harry was nowhere to be found. It didn’t feel good, and it didn’t feel bad. It felt absent; completely void of anything except for the vivid inkling she was going to be sick.

“God, I missed you,” Harry murmured once they were inside, wrapping her up in his arms as tightly as he could and holding her for a long while. He’d done this every time they’d been together since Daria’s visit to the hospital. The moment he could get her in his arms, he held her like she was going to disappear right from his grasp if he let go. He didn’t understand what happened to his Daria, not in the slightest. And Daria had yet to be in the spirits to explain.

“You just saw me yesterday,” she intoned blankly, the sound of her own voice distant and unfamiliar.

“Twenty-four hours too many,” he countered, kissing her softly with his ephemeral lips.

As he pulled away it was like her mouth filled with pennies, metallic and horrifying. It wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling, which maybe explained why she felt no emotion at all as she ran to the bathroom. Harry called after her, trailing behind her in confusion. She collapsed on the ground in front of the toilet, releasing the contents of her stomach into the bowl. It was mostly acid, burning her throat as she retched and Harry watched in horror from the doorway.

Daria wiped her mouth, leaning up against the wall with her face pressed to her hands. She must have been having a reaction to the Prozac, she decided as she heaved a shaking breath. Harry came to her side running a hand through her hair in an effort to get it away from her face.

“Are you okay?” he questioned in a panic, though the answer was clear. “What’s going on?”

Daria didn’t answer, instead keeping her face pressed to her knees. Feeling nothing but the burning of her throat and the uncontrollable tremors in her bones. She could sense Harry’s eyes on her, their attention completely unwavering.

“Daria, you’re scaring me,” he murmured, his voice low.

She was quiet for a moment longer, trying to decide if she could open her mouth without vomiting again. “Prozac,” she weakly responded before another round of retching. This time, the remains of the small pill surfaced in the toilet bowl, finally gone from her system.

“What?” Harry questioned breathlessly, utterly lost.

“They put me on Prozac,” Daria explained blankly, resting her forehead against the cool lip of the toilet. “For my anxiety.”

“What are you talking about?”

Daria sighed, trying to regain some sense of composure in her bay of misfiled emotions. It seemed to be time to tell Harry the truth. To tell Harry everything. “Could you grab me a glass of water? I’ll explain once I get the taste of puke out of my mouth.”

Harry was immediately on his feet, running to the kitchen to fill one of his overpriced glasses with filtered water from the fridge. Daria thought about how silly it all was as everything slowly faded to black, her body too weak to keep her up anymore. So sleepy, she thought, struggling to keep her eyes open. Harry dropped the glass on the tile floor and Daria just barely caught the sound of it shattering, then the sound of Harry cursing profusely as he ran back to the cabinet to try again.

By the time he got back to her, she’d fallen asleep on the bathroom floor.



She woke up again an hour and a half later in Harry’s bed. He sat next to her, picking through a copy of Fight Club between fitful glances in her direction. When he noticed her stir, he immediately set down the book, his hands going to her face to caress it gently. His seemingly endless emerald eyes looked back at hers with desperate concern.

“Hey,” he murmured. “How are you feeling?”

Daria sat up, rubbing absently at her temples. The nausea had subsided and instead left the sour taste of vomit in her mouth, her hands finally able to sit still. When she looked at Harry, she felt the intensity of emotions she harbored towards him – the anxiety behind telling him the truth, the guilt of making him worry, the desire she had to be with him and make him as happy as she could. With a deep sigh of relief, she concluded that the effects of the Prozac were out of her system. She was finally herself again.

“Better,” she replied, her voice hoarse from the acidity. “Water?”

Harry handed her a glass from the nightstand, which she gladly accepted, guzzling the entire thing in a few swift gulps. He watched her intently, the intense concern unwavering. Again, Daria knew there was no putting this off any further. She had to finally come clean.

“I’m so sorry Harry,” she murmured, casting her gaze away from him. “I told you that you didn’t know what you were getting into with me.”

“Then enlighten me.”

His voice was cold, though she could tell he was trying to remain supportive. She almost wished he would just yell at her, just get it over with rather than caring about her the way he always did. It would have made revealing her secrets a lot easier.

“You know when I told you I was visiting a sociologist in that office building when we ran into each other?” she questioned gingerly, still unable to look him in the eye for confirmation. “I was really seeing a psychologist, Dr. Gupta. He’s been helping me work through a major anxiety disorder for the last few months now.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Harry quietly asked. She finally glanced over to him, catching a glimpse of his face. His complexion had gone a ghostly shade of white, expression a mixture of confusion and dismay, along with something else Daria couldn’t quite place. She quickly lost her nerve and averted her gaze once more.

“I was afraid of scaring you off,” she explained, wringing her hands in his pristine white sheets. “My treatment was going so well, I thought I was going to be able to control my anxiety to the point where you would never have to know.”

Harry said nothing.

“It was going really well until last Friday,” Daria mused as she tucked her somehow bare knees up to her chin. “I’d been keeping this journal of everything I’d been feeling, I’d learned to meditate…”

“How long has this been going on for?” Harry asked.

“Ever since my dad passed, I guess,” she mumbled in an awkward response. “I spent so much time taking care of my mom that I forgot how to interact with people in a social setting. It was manageable in my small town when I knew everyone, but when I went to Wesleyan it was out of control. I came here to try and get my life back again.”

“Jesus,” Harry breathed in his heartbreakingly beautiful voice. Daria’s eyes welled with tears. It hurt her so much to rip the rug out from underneath Harry so violently, and she wished she had never kept it all from him in the first place.

“I really thought I was going to be able to beat it on my own until everything fell apart last week,” she managed to squeak, though her voice was quivering from the tears. “Reconnecting with my dad like that was like saying goodbye to him all over again. No amount of meditation or journaling could have prepared me for that. So after I freaked out and ended up in the hospital, they prescribed me Prozac. Tonight was my first time taking it. Guess it didn’t really sit well with me.”

“Daria…”

“It’s my burden to carry,” she continued. “I’d been carrying it alone for so long, I don’t think I knew how to share it. I mean… I had an anxiety attack the very first day I met you in that Starbucks on the West End. And about a million other times since then. The first person I ever really told was Dr. Gupta.”

“So when you ran out when I tried to apologize?” he questioned.

“Puked on the sidewalk after I managed to lose the paparazzi, I was so anxious,” she clarified. “That and I thought you were a prat.”

Harry didn’t laugh. “When the media came out about us?”

“I think telling your mom and Robin was worse, to be honest.”

“When you saw me and Cara on our way to our meeting?”

“I didn’t sleep at all that night.”

“Oh god, I’m so sorry. I wish I could have convinced you right then it was nothing, I’m so sorry.”

They didn’t talk for a while, the silence forming a void between them. Harry’s room was eerily quiet, not even the humming of a fan resonating in the unreasonably large room. Daria swore her heartbeat was so loud, it would be the only audible thing for Harry to pick up on. It was like it could have beaten right out of her chest.

In the silence, Daria had no choice but to turn to Harry. “We’re a team, Daria,” he murmured, his lips hardly moving in his attempt to stay calm. “We go through these things. I want to go through these things together.”

Something seemed distinctly off about Harry, in a way that she had seen once before. It reminded her of the day she first visited Dr. Gupta, the way Harry had acted when they ran into each other afterward. “Harry, I – ” she started in an attempt to recover her tracks, but he cut her off.

“No, please. I need it to be my turn to talk.”

Daria clamped her mouth shut immediately, turning her body so her full attention would be faced towards Harry. He deserved at least that much of her. Their bodies aligned almost perfectly, though her torso left her several inches shorter than him, his shoulders square and brave. With a deep breath, Harry met her gaze, holding it with a force that proved he refused to let go.

“Daria,” he began, voice shaky. “You are beautiful, you are amazingly kind, bloody fucking brilliant and while you stun me, you absolutely terrify me. I don’t deserve you whatsoever.”

Daria didn’t know what to say; speechlessness was a feeling she should have grown used to with Harry, but it seemed to knock her off her feet every time.

“You’ve scared me to death these last few days,” he continued, causing the pit of guilt to reform in Daria’s stomach. “I wish I had been able to help. I wish you weren’t so sad. You don’t deserve it, not in the slightest.”

“But I’m not sad when I’m with you, Harry,” she protested, all the truth in her heart carried in her words. “With you, I actually manage to feel safe.”

A funny expression came to Harry’s features. “Come here,” he murmured, outstretching his arms to hold her once more. She curled into him, letting everything fall into place the way it always seemed to.

“Do you have your laptop on you?” she asked, and almost immediately it appeared in his lap from the spot on his bedside table. With shaky resolve, Daria typed in the address to her anxiety journal. She decided that she might as well open up to him entirely if she’d already gone this far. She may as well talk him through everything. He deserved to know.

Together, they paged through the seemingly endless posts, the combination of her highs and lows. “Dr. Gupta suggested I keep a journal to try and meditate on my thoughts more easily,” she explained, scrolling through the posts. “Some of it is about my anxiety, but a lot of it represents what makes me happy. I think it helps me focus on the positives. For the most part, that’s what I meditate on.”

Harry didn’t say anything, instead allowing his eyes to travel along the page. As they went through the posts, Daria nervously explained each one. It was becoming clearer and clearer that the Prozac was wearing off as her emotions returned. Harry pressed a kiss to the top of her head, trying to reassure her.

Eventually, Daria began to drift off, exhausted from the avalanche of information. And while she lightly snored against his shoulder, Harry continued to examine the page, the eerie blue glow of the laptop illuminating his concerned expression.

When she awoke in the morning, Daria vowed herself one thing: no more Prozac.