INDIGO➵Harry Styles

7___REMATCH___

Staying holed up in my hotel room was pathetic. Well, at least I could still be honest with myself.

I lost myself in painting and sleeping to the point where the only constants became the sun setting and rising. All they were was a background, a garish blur of colour far away from me, as my eyes were either zeroed in on a canvas or closed, hoping for dreams. I usually liked lots of windows in my suites, enjoying the rays of the sun and their warmth always being accessible to me, and the endlessness of the night to be nearby.

Painting was supposed to get him out of my system. My brush would follow its own course for a little while, until somehow he would appear in the smoothness of an edge or the brightness of a colour. That was the meaning of stubbornness though, my principal trait. To continue, in cycles, until some result was reached for no other reason than pride, as I was doing now.

It took more canvases than I could count to stop shifting to the worlds of his eyes. My canvases expanded, with the decision to launch into battle hoping for sheer size of troops to lead to victory. One of them alone covered a quarter of the living room wall. To me, it was a soldier of high stature. It made me feel fearless.

I remembered Jude in "Across the Universe" throwing buckets after buckets of paint at his walls, so I tried it, to feel free like him. There was no way I could forget how angry he looked, how torn apart inside he must have been to be on the brink of losing everything for nothing, so I kept him as company while I cast my waves of colour. If my eyes weren't so sore, I might have said that they looked a certain kind of beautiful. That certain kind of beautiful that makes you feel something, even if it's not precise or well-planned or neatly fitting into some art book category. It didn't have to be sellable at all. Who would want to buy anything of this, anyway?

I didn't want that five star hotel room service sh*t. Food was the only reason I would even bother getting dressed and shoving down the pedal of my bike again, way too hard, launching me with no control onto the highway.

I couldn't really taste the freshness of the air, or feel the sea in it, even speeding through at full force, even when I drove without my helmet and tried, tried to feel something.

I didn't have a death wish. At least I didn't think so. I just wanted to let my senses be claimed by something again, to be surprised, to feel excited or lost. My fairy godmother must have been watching over me then. A psycho fairy godmother. Bibbity bobbity dead.

Some guy almost ran me over. His truck could have chewed up my bike in no time. And me. A massive metal mouth to swallow what was low on the food chain and wouldn't be missed. My heart was electrified, its rhythm shocked into overdrive and then lost completely for just half a moment, as I imagined the hot asphalt I had battled with for so long, an old and familiar adversary, would claim me once and for all. A duel that could only end with me being punished. I was waiting to lose my boiling blood to shards of glass, letting it explode with shots of gasoline, crushed bones and skin that was too young and still destructible. I stopped breathing. It was as though I didn't need to breathe, as though my body were gambling its integrity for the freedom of oblivion. You wanna be reckless? Well, I'm calling your bluff. The most terrifying part was this: I enjoyed it. And I felt free of everything. I didn't even need oxygen. I didn't need anyone, or anything. And for a few precious seconds, it mattered.

I almost thanked him.

I genuinely have no idea how I made it back. I was laughing like a maniac, flipping my hair out of its ponytail and letting it whip behind me, a mess that was free. I heard that laugh of mine and it scared the hell out of me, but I laughed, I laughed and laughed and laughed, my numb hands could hardly grip the steering, gravity wasn't holding me to the leather seat anymore, I imagined myself being cast off for good this time, so I laughed even more and I laughed the hardest when I pictured myself and some scrap metal in pieces on the highway, policemen seeking someone to identify me and finding no one, and my stomach ached from the jolts that seized my muscles all over with my attempts to breathe through my shrieks.