Heavy Heart

The next morning, Daria woke up to snow falling lightly outside her window. The whole town was practically pristine, families tucked safely inside their homes with their Christmas breakfasts and abundance of presents. She was still in her clothes from the day before with her eyes sore and swollen from the tears, her mind completely and utterly disoriented. The entire house smelled of her mother’s special French toast bake, a meal Daria had missed terribly while she was away. It took everything in her to not go straight downstairs; instead taking time to strip herself of the woes of yesterday.

Harry’s voice rang in her ears as she prepared herself for a fresh, Christmas Day start. I love you, he said as she washed her hair. I love you, he said as she applied her makeup without Litzy’s watchful hand. I love you, he said as she affixed her top knot. I love you, he said as she slipped into her Christmas dress. I love you, I love you, I love you.

She could yell at him, scream at the top of her lungs for doing this to her. For trampling her in the stampede of his glamorous life, seeming not to care, and then pulling this stunt on national radio. For breaking her heart and then acting like he could just take it back. But at the same time, her heart longed to let him take it back, to call him right then and tell him she forgave him, to fix everything once and for all. She was at war with herself, truly. But it didn’t matter anyway. He would certainly be back in Holmes Chapel by then.

She imagined Anne’s house as she descended the stairs, Robin, Harry and Gemma around the kitchen table eating Christmas dinner, as it would be much later in the day. Harry would have gotten them all lavish, outlandish presents, and they would all be laughing and toying with them by now. He would be happy with them. They would make him happy in a way that she never could. Maybe he would be thinking of her, maybe he wouldn’t. There was no way of her knowing.

“Good morning,” Georgia greeted from the kitchen, the faint trails of Christmas radio playing in the background. Of course, the boys’ version of I’ll Be Home For Christmas was on the radio. Daria sighed. Georgia realized the situation and quickly signaled to Jeff, who was seated at the kitchen table with the radio, to change the channel.

“Merry Christmas,” Daria greeted with a smile, eyeing her mother and Jeff. It was a tradition in their house to dress up for Christmas, even before church, so her mother could scrapbook the pictures and have them look oddly and hilariously put together. Those scrapbooks had been empty for a while now. But this year, Georgia was in a deep mauve dress, Jeff’s tie to match. He glanced up at her and returned the smile.

“Same to you, Daria,” he rumbled in his deep voice.

Georgia left the stove’s side to take her daughter in her arms. “Merry Christmas,” she breathed happily, the scent of her perfume revived in Daria’s memory. “I love you.”

I love you.

“I love you too, Mom.”

“Would you do me a favor?” her mother asked, returning to the French toast. “I forgot to get the mail yesterday. Would you grab it? The Christmas card from your cousins should be here by now.”

“Sure,” Daria offered padding over to the front door, slipping into her coat and stepping into a pair of boots for the walk to the mailbox. From the window, she could see that it was still snowing, a light breeze catching the flakes and swirling them in the most stupidly perfect way. Daria sighed again as she took hold of the door handle, shaking her head. It would be the perfect day to be perfectly happy. Only, she couldn’t bring herself to it.

She watched her feet as she stepped into the snow, the untouched blanket coming up a couple inches around the sole of her shoes. Her skin was just barely protected from the winter wind, and while the dancing flakes were beautiful, they had an impeccable way of getting in her eyes. She kept them on the ground as she stepped forward into the bright morning sun peeking from behind the clouds, glancing up only for a minute. And when she did so, her heart stopped right in her chest.

Harry.

He was standing mid-stride just feet from her, eyes tired and somehow wide with fearful anticipation. It was as though he hadn’t slept properly in days, the same way Daria had felt ever since they went their separate ways. Beneath his peacoat he wore a grey suit and tie, her favorite color suit on him. Everything seemed to slow to a halt around her, their bodies both frozen at the sight of each other. A few snowflakes caught in the tumbling curls of his hair, nestling perfectly into the place where her hands once playfully roamed.

With a gasp, she turned on her heel to run back inside. She couldn’t do it. Not now, maybe not ever. She couldn’t face the man who broke her heart. She just couldn’t.

“Daria, wait!” he called after her, bringing her to a stop once more. The sound of his voice resonated in her core as though he’d strummed her like a guitar string. She never thought she’d hear it that closely ever again.

“Please, just give me a chance to talk.”

“What are you doing here?” she asked, slowly turning to face him. He stood now at the edge of the steps, hand on the railing and one foot on the first stair. His eyes were turned up to her with the most sincere look of pure emotion he ever showed her, full lips parted just slightly the way she loved. “Shouldn’t you be at home?”

“I’m scheduled to be, yeah,” he confirmed with a slight nod. “But when I was supposed to be getting on the plane, all I could think about is that the place I should be is with you.”

A torrent of war boiled within her, her hands giving their telltale shake in her coat pockets, hidden from Harry’s view. How could he show up at her house uninvited on Christmas Day, thumb on her heart and sadness in his eyes? How could he do that to her when just weeks ago he’d ripped the world raw right beneath her?

“Shouldn’t you be with Cara?” she asked indignantly, though she knew that wasn’t the truth, casting her gaze to the snowy ground below them. “I saw you two together on the cover of just about every magazine in America.”

“Daria,” he sighed. “Just give me a chance. I can explain everything if you just give me a chance.”

“You have five minutes. Only because I know this is your Christmas wish.”

A look of recognition crossed his face, surprise and some sort of poorly-harnessed hope. “You listened to the show?”

“You’re wasting time,” she responded instead.

“Alright,” he breathed, running his hand nervously through his fringe, the way he always did. Daria had him memorized like a page from her favorite book, able to recite everything about him backwards and forward. His familiar look of concentrated contemplation crossed his face, the way he always looked when he was thinking hard before he spoke.

“I should have just told you before,” he muttered to himself. “So we wouldn’t be standing here doing this right now.”

“Told me what?” she questioned urgently.

Harry took a deep breath before opening his mouth to speak again. “All those times you saw me in that building downtown, when I was going to meetings with my manager and Burberry with Cara,” he began apprehensively, keeping his respectful distance from her.

“I wasn’t really going to any meetings. Cara and I were actually going to counseling sessions. With Dr. Gupta.”

Daria felt the weightless plight of shock strike her and nearly blow her over, crashing her to the snowy porch beneath her. “What?” she gasped breathlessly, beginning to feel a little light headed.

“Cara’s mom thought it would be a good idea,” he expanded as he took another step towards her, Daria’s body encouragingly inching her forward towards him. “She was dealing with self image problems and didn’t want to go alone, and… well. The pressure gets to me sometimes.”

He turned his gaze away from her for a moment, a visible lump forming in his throat as a sniffle came into his nose. His hand fluttered to the corner of his eye, the thick curl of his hair covering exactly what was going on. But immediately Daria knew he was crying, her heart lurching at the sight.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to break out the tears on you, this wasn’t how it was supposed to go,” he managed to choke out, his voice broken with tears. “It’s just really hard to talk about. The only people I’ve ever really talked about it with are Cara and Dr. Gupta.”

Instinctively, Daria took a step towards him to close the space between them, to go and comfort him, but reluctantly stopped herself. She loved him, she hated to see him so sad, but she couldn’t let her guard down.

“It’s hard not to care about what people think, you know?” he muttered, swallowing hard and returning his gaze to her, eyes brimming with embarrassed, deeply hurt tears. “And when there’s just so much of it, it gets to you after a while. And it gets to me quite a lot, actually. To the point where I needed to get help.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Daria questioned quietly, her voice as soft as a wisp. Their breath materialized between them in the cold Connecticut air, all the things they never said suddenly coming into fruition in front of their very eyes.

“For the same reasons you didn’t tell me, I suppose,” he mused. “I didn’t want to scare you away with all the baggage I was carrying – I kept telling myself that everything between us was all too new, that with everything else that comes with me, you wouldn’t want to deal with my problems too. And when the truth finally came out about your anxiety, I couldn’t put that extra weight on you. I couldn’t weigh you down. You have a heavy enough heart to begin with.”

Daria opened her mouth to speak but couldn’t find the words to describe what she was feeling. Everything inside her seemed to be tearing into two different halves, the half she kept desperately guarded and the other half she wanted to give to him at the sound of his words. She wished there was any way she ever could have known.

“I just thought I’d let you know, I understand,” he murmured, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a small, red Moleskine notebook. “I have a heavy heart too.”

She took the book in her hands, the heat from his body warming the pages cover to cover. It was his journal, the same one that Dr. Gupta had prescribed to her. With careful hands, she opened it – revealing pages upon pages of Harry’s anxieties. His joys and his sorrows. His triumphs and his failures. And most of all, pages and pages of them. Pages and pages of their life together.

She wanted so badly to be mad at him, to yell at him for lying to her for so long. But she knew in her heart that she had done the same thing for the exact same reasons, to protect him the way he wanted to protect her. The twisted inner workings of their minds were complicated yet stunningly the same, taking them down the same paths and leading them straight to each other once more.

“That’s why you broke up with me?”

“When you said you loved me, I got scared, I really did,” Harry explained softly. “All these thoughts were running through my head and I just needed space to figure them out. And with space came the fear that I was going to break you with all my burdens. With all the attention that gives you anxiety, with all my problems that would definitely make it worse… I just assumed without even talking to you about it and it was wrong of me, it really was.”

Again, in was quiet between them.

“I was afraid of letting you love me,” he murmured. “I was afraid of dragging you under with me. I was afraid I would mess you up. I was afraid that it would be too much for you. I thought I was protecting you.”

“But Harry… I would have wanted to help you,” she whispered, tears now coming to her eyes as well. He looked strained at the sight of her, upset at the idea that he had upset her too. They both knew that was what he was avoiding all along.

“You still can,” he insisted, that hopeful tone returning. “And God willing, I want you to.”

“But we haven’t been honest with each other,” she protested, the tears now streaming down her cheeks as steadily as the Christmas snow. “We’ve been keeping secrets from each other this whole time rather than working together. That’s not healthy.”

“Daria,” he breathed. “We may not be perfect, I think you know that as well as I do. But I recall a handful of days ago, you wanted to make this work. And after days of thinking about how much of an idiot I am, I realized I want to make this work too. More than anything.”

He took another step towards her, their bodies mere inches from each other. His hand went to her forearm, causing an undeniable electric current to shoot straight through her bones. Her hair stood on end at his touch and at the same time, everything that held her together fell apart, wishing more than ever that things didn’t have to be so complicated.

“I know you may not have all the answers, and I don’t either,” he continued, his fingers moving from her arm to her cheek, caressing her skin ever so gently. “But I do know this: I will do anything to get you back. Anything.”

“Anything?” she asked, her lips trembling along with her quaking hands.

A small smile spread across his beautiful, full lips. “I’ll always leave the crossword for you in the morning paper because I know how much you love to do it. And I’ll always go to Liverpool matches with you, even if that makes me a bad Manchester fan.”

She found herself unable to breathe as he launched himself into a list of all the things he would do for her, the war inside her coming to a head. His eyes were locked intently on to hers, the emerald quality swimming with sincerity.

“I will never complain about the bloody bobby pins you manage leave everywhere you go,” he promised with teasing endearment, his hand smoothing a stray hair from her top knot back into place. Daria laughed through her tears.

“I’ll always keep the very best baking supplies in my house so we can bake together whenever you want, whatever you want, and I will always eat the product,” he vowed with solidarity. “I’ll always be ready for a trip to the Louvre, or wherever or whatever you want.”

Her legs could hardly hold her up anymore, the world rocking with tremors around her as Harry professed his love and dedication. His tone turned serious at his final item on his list, voice as clear and pure as a bell.

“And most importantly, I’ll never keep anything like this from you ever again. And if you decided you don’t want to come back to me… I’ll always love you. Because I do. I love you, Daria. I have ever since I met you. And I always will.”

They stood and silence for a moment, not even the snow giving a whisper. Daria couldn’t find the words to describe what she felt – she felt everything at once for Harry, with Harry, because of Harry.

And that’s why when he turned from her to walk down the front path in defeat, she called after him. And that’s why when he looked back at her with an expression entirely void of any expectation, she went after him. And that’s why when he caught her up in his arms, she kissed him without any sense of abandon.

Because she loved him. Because they could work this out. Because they were meant to be together and the universe knew it as well as they did. Because when he kissed her, the stars aligned, and when he held her in his arms, she never felt so safe. Because he loved her.

And she would take him inside to meet her mother and he would meet Jeff. And together they would eat breakfast, since it was still early and they could take their time. And they would open presents together, Daria embarrassed to find that he had in fact been at Harrod’s with Cara picking out a beautiful pearl necklace for her Christmas gift, with a card promising that she could add the pearl from her father too. And she would tell him she was accepted back to Birmingham and they would laugh and cry all over again. They would be happy together. Because she made him happy in a way no one ever could. He was always thinking of her, even though she had never known how much before that day.

“You know,” she murmured into his chest once he let her go. “It really is ironic that your single is I’ll Be Home For Christmas when you’re spending it here instead.”

“Oh, Daria,” he replied with a chuckle and a sigh. “Home is wherever I’m with you.”