And She Made the Shape of My Heart With Her Hands

It was pretty silent in the car. All the exhaustion and disappointment mixed together to create a concoction to seize our voices from discussion. The exhaustion wasn’t just from playing their hearts and souls out on stage, but also because nobody had slept last night. Everyone stayed awake, probably still trying to soak up every minute, second, and millisecond of this summer tour that we had left. The disappointment stood for the reason of the tour itself being finished with. The whole ride home was bittersweet.

“Go to sleep,” I softly directed to Pat, my head on his chest as he leaned against the window.

Pat looked down to me, his expression blank, again from the exhaustion and disappointment, and his eyes glazed over with an unhealthy and drained pink shade. “I don’t want to,” he replied with gently, almost like a child refusing to go to bed.

“Pat, you’re exhausted. Your eyes are worse than just bloodshot.”

His features slightly contorted with aversion to my reply. “But… I… Um…”

I softly chuckled and stroked his cheek a couple times, keeping eye contact with him. “Go to sleep,” I instructed once again. “We’re going from one side of the country to another; you have plenty of time to be awake and attempt to reminisce the tour’s memories. But, sweetie, just… relax. Sleep.”

Pat blinked a couple of times and the sighed, knowing what I had just said was pretty close, if not completely, the truth. “Alright,” he barely whispered, closing his eyes and resting his head back.

“Good boy,” I jokingly praised him with a chuckle. I noticed Pat smiled a little bit, too. I started running my hand along his arm to help calm him down a bit. As my hand continued to draw the consistent invisible patterns and lines, I myself took some time to look around.

Everybody looked like zombies, completely members of the undead. Everyone’s eyes were glazed over and tired, shoulders slumped, and hair tousled about. They gazed around the interior of the beyond-memorable van as if it were the first time they had not only seen the van, but had been in a moving vehicle altogether. To bluntly put it, the scene before my very eyes could only be described as a bunch of boys lying around a van looking stoned as ever, or a handful of guys silently mourning over a lost loved one. And it was all over one simple summer tour…

In a strange and incommunicable way, I sort of admired them for that.

“You guys look dead,” I pointed out softly yet firmly, trying not to disturb my sleeping boyfriend, yet trying to get the other’s attention to the back.

“Eh,” Kennedy uttered, his head lolling over to the other side, towards my way.

“You should go to sleep,” I recommended, pulling some hair out of my face and then blinking my lashes. “All of you.”

“It doesn’t matter if we stay awake right now or not; we’re getting a hotel once we hit Ohio,” John told me.

“Oh.”

“Yep. That’s something nice; we get to stop at hotels instead of worrying about pulling all-nighters,” Jared joked with a tired smile.

I chuckled a little, trying to force at least a tiny bit of happiness into this gloomy van. “Yay.”

“I don’t feel like going to sleep,” Kennedy mentioned aloud. “My body feels tired but like, I don’t feel tired. You know?”

“No, I don’t know,” I joked, cracking a smile at Kennedy when he glared over at me. He, too, smiled.

When it later started to fade from the late afternoon and it soon started to break into the dark night, things were pretty much the same. The scenery inside the van was the same from the hours before except that Pat was once again awake, (big surprise there), and the view from the outside was pretty similar as well.

“I thought you said that we would get a hotel once we were in Ohio?”

“Shut up, Cara,” my brother grumbled.

I glared at Garrett as John answered my question, “We are. By the way, welcome to the Holiday Inn.” He turned the wheel this way and that a few times and stopped the car with a small jolt, turning the ignition off with a turn of the keys.

“Wow, you’re dumb,” Garrett muttered as he pushed my head back with his palm, sliding out of the van when he swung the door open.

I sighed, not even bothering to feel embarrassed. I was too tired myself. “Can you hand me that?” I asked Pat, pointing at my beloved bag that was laid inches from his foot.

Pat handed it over to me without a word, for he was too exhausted. We both knew that his ‘nap’ was hardly a nap at all. It was more like closing his eyes and daydreaming, I bet. His eyes still had that tired tint shading them, though not as crimson as before.

After going through all the crap in the way back and getting all our junk, we slowly made our way across the pitch-black concrete and into the bright hotel, into the main lobby. There we all dropped our stuff on the ground with a dense noise, before immediately plopping down onto the oddly colored couches the reception area supplied.

“Good thing nobody was sitting here before,” Jared spoke.

“Ha. There probably was someone sitting there; you’re just sitting on top of them,” said Garrett.

Jared let out a tired sort of laugh and rested his head back, closing his eyes. “Well if there really is someone underneath me, it sucks for them, because I’m not moving until-”

“Got our cards,” Kennedy said as he approached us, the white room cards in hand. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

“Word,” my brother muttered. I chuckled and followed everyone to the elevators.