Rain Sound
red umbrella.
In the wee hours of the night, I hear familiar songs from the radio.
“Harry, isn’t this that new song you’ve been singing in the shower non-stop?” Louis’s eyes shone with love and his voice trickled down Harry’s eardrums like coffee, his smile bouncing off the walls and love infecting Harry in all the worst(and best) ways possible.
Harry just smiled and passed a knowing glance to his best friend, his eyes saying what Louis already knew: that yes, the song blasting from the broken down radio was the one Harry sang for Louis when he hoped he was listening.
“It’s good, but your version is better.”
And that was why Harry loved Louis in all perpetual ways possible.
There are two empty cups of coffee.
Louis toyed with the chipping cup in front of him, eyes bounding from the doorway to Harry, then his chaffing knuckles and chewed fingernails.
“Lou, what’s wrong?” Maybe Harry should have known, maybe it was Harry’s fault for not being able to love Louis enough; not being able to understand the signs and little things that contorted and fucked up Louis.
“Nothing, Harry.” It was a simple lie that Louis knew Harry would believe, passing it off with a smile and a sip of the steaming coffee; the steaming love that filled the space between lover and lost.
A person to be forgotten like a passing by black and white film.
Harry turned and ran his delicate digits over the face he knew all to well; the face he could pull from a crowd of billions, the face he saw against his eyelids when he slept and awoke and ate. He let his deep orbs, filled under with black bags, run up and down the caricature of the photographed flesh in his hands. He let a rooted sigh pass his thin lips as he remembered everything he didn’t want to and tried to shift through the scattered puzzle pieces that were left of his conscious mind.
A bright red umbrella, wet and drenched clothes and sneakers.
Harry remembered when they first met; when they first laid eyes on one another and when they first loved each other as purely as they ever could.
Harry was walking back to his lone apartment, rain matting his hair to his head and making his clothes stick to him in all the wrong places. As he walked the sound of his sneakers, that empty thud, reverberated the ground under him and struck his heart, making him realize just how hollow and mangled that mound of flesh was to begin with.
But then another body, cold and haggard, slammed into his heaving chest and all he could see was a pair of wet sneakers and wide eyes. The umbrella the boy held was red, to red for someone as soft as him, and Harry just smiled, asking the boy if he wanted to come in and have some coffee and pretend he wasn’t standing up his girlfriend.