Before you go... //h.s

Steel Magnolias.

After many conversations with Maya, many conversations with my parents and too many overthinking panics in my always active brain, I finally had done it.

I'd bought a ticket.

So just over two months after my birthday, 8th December 2019, when I'd meant to tell them about it, I was finally going back to England for the first time in four years. As excited as I was to see my home country again, see the familiar rolling hills and hear the jolly conversations in our local pub, a pit of nervousness ate at my stomach.

I hadn't seen my parents in over a year now and I understand that for most people, that would be unthinkable, but my parents and I just weren't that close. We talked on the phone of course, but lately, more and more often it had only been my Dad talking to me and my Mother whispering a hurried hello.

I had obviously put way too much of my time into thinking about this and the only conclusion I had come to was that they were fighting badly, maybe even going to get divorced and didn't want to be on the phone together anymore.

But even that didn't really make sense because my mother still didn't phone me separately.

I was missing something, but I wasn't sure exactly what it was that I was missing.

The flight was...tolerable. I was squashed next to a man who had no regard for personal space and sat sprawled over his seat and half of mine which meant I had less room than I should have, but the large selection of films in front of me had distracted me from the numbness spreading through my limbs as they were awkwardly twisted into the small space.

I'd ended up choosing Steel Magnolias – one of the few comedies that would make you cry. And sure enough, as the announcement came over the speakers that the plane was coming into land, tears were streaming unattractively down my face.

But ever since Harry and I had ended, all I'd wanted to watch were films that made me cry. I'd fallen into a permanent pit of depression where I could be bothered to do nothing, and everything seemed too much effort.

Except crying – that was one thing that still felt easy.

Even though nearly three months had gone by, my insides still felt like the same black ash that had fallen the day our relationship had finally burned it's string. Because how was I supposed to carry on when I'd lost the one thing that lit up my life no matter what?

And these sad films...they give me temporary distractions in the form of other people's pain from the devasting ache in my heart that's been there for too long.

Then I've got the other Harry thing I need to worry about: a thing I can't talk to anyone else about in case it spoils the surprise: his album release.

Ever since I met him, he was working towards the deadline of 13th December and recently, I'd been acutely aware that that day was fast approaching. It was heading straight from me like a bullet train, ready to knock me even further under than I already was.

Although I'd heard some of the songs before, and bits and pieces of lyrics from the others, I wasn't really sure exactly what direction he'd finally chosen to take the album in and despite the couple of singles he'd already released, I couldn't listen to them.

I couldn't hear his voice.

There was also a faint nagging in the back of my head because I was well aware that artists write from experience and if Harry had been feeling even half the emotions that I had these past months, then there was a chance I was on the album somewhere, written unnamed into one of the songs.

But even if no-one else knew who he was talking about, I would be able to sense if the song was about me. And listening to a song about me was something I could never do because: