DAYLIGHT FADING

twenty-nine | if you were here beside me

It takes two days for Chris, Seb and Finn to turn up on my doorstep. It has been over two years since I have seen the latter in person and I nearly shake, wondering what will happen.

They don’t exactly have reason to think about me in a complimentary manner.

Instead, Finn launches himself into a hug and I just bury my face into his jumper. He is the most forgiving of all of them, the least tainted by the world. It is good to know that he hasn’t changed that much.

He still smells like the detergent his mum always uses, all soft and lemony. His hair is slightly coarse against my face and he is a tiny bit taller than I remember, but he still feels exactly like Finn Richards.

I cling onto him, desperate to remember what it feels like to be held by a friend, to remember what it’s like to hug Finn. He’s bulkier, the muscles in his arms built up from drumming for a living. I wonder if I’d notice it if I really thought about it with the others.

Chris clears his throat, as if to remind the two of us that there is one more person to address in this situation. I glance up from where my face is perched on Finn’s shoulder to where Seb is stood, hovering in the doorway.

He doesn’t smile but I can see one in his eyes. That’s enough for me. At least I know he’s still saving his smiles for all of the really special moments, the kind that you remember every detail of.

It is only when Finn releases me from the hug that I realise that I have absolutely no idea what the hell they’re doing here. Clearly they haven’t brought the pitchfork brigade but that doesn’t mean that they’re not going to drop some sort of emotional bombshell on me.

The members of Chaos Theory have a habit of doing that.

“What are you all doing here?” Chris slides a grin towards Seb who twitches just slightly towards a smile, there for all of three seconds.

“You and Adam had a bit of a healing session,” I raise an eyebrow at him which only gets me more of his grin, “and we figured that maybe the two of you wouldn’t go nuclear if we tried to broach the topic.”

“What topic?” are they going to try and get us in the same TV interview, because if so, I should probably warn them that we’re still a little messy. Then again, we will probably still be like that in a decade.

Finn is shaking slightly, like he always does when he’s excited about something he wants to say but he knows that he’s not allowed to. The last time I saw it, it was just before he blurted out that Chaos Theory were going to see an A&R guy from one of the indie labels in Norwich. It was the start of their journey.

Maybe this is something about the next chapter in theirs.

“We want you to join the band again,” the fact that it’s Seb saying it makes it all sound reasonable, like it’s that simple.

Of course, it’s not that simple. Their fans and the press will have a field day, there’s no guarantee that they will like how my voice sounds after far too many cigarettes and most importantly of all, Adam will tell them to fuck off.

Just because we had what Chris terms a ‘healing session’ doesn’t mean that he wants to share the dream we once had together with me again, especially after I broke it. He certainly doesn’t want to spend most of his life with me on the same stage as him, writing songs with him, scribbling in his notebook margins.

And of course, my heart is still a silly stupid creature that wants that dream more than anything. It wants to say yes more than anything else in the world and I could curse it. Human nature leaves us wanting the things that have the chance to destroy us and somehow they might be the only things that would truly heal us.