The Timeline [h.s.]

80.

March 12th, 2019:

Life without Harry was... weird.

It hadn't even been a week since Harry had decreed that whatever had been going on between them - at that point Claire wasn't even sure she could call it a friendship, in good conscience - was over for real and Claire had been feeling very empty.

There wasn't another adjective to describe her frame of mind at the moment.

She had thought she'd feel terrible, and she had for the whole duration of her hysterical, sobbing-filled, crying session she had had immediately after Harry had left, as David held her and rocked her back and forth, holding back the question Claire knew he had been wanting to ask her all along: wasn't that what she had wanted?

Honestly, no it hadn't been. Now Claire could say the truth for what it was. She was 100% sure that she hadn't absolutely wanted Harry to walk out of her life definitely. So, in the end, David had been proved right, once again, because it was true, what he had said: Claire would've liked to keep Harry in her life, even if it would've been on the sidelines and their friendship would've only been a cracked facade none of them would believe in.

Anyways, it was over now, Harry had taken the decision for the both of them - and Claire knew that, if she told it to anyone, giving them all the details of what had led them there, and her all-consuming fear of ever letting their friendship get something more than what it had been until she had decided to acknowledge her feelings for him, they would tell her that Harry had taken the right decision. That it would've only hurt them in the long run, if they kept on circling each other, slipping up and crossing a line from time to time, only to withdraw to lick their wounds, and then go back to acting like nothing had happened. It couldn't lead to anything good.

And still, Claire was sure that, whatever she would've felt, had they kept their ruse up, would've been infinitely better than whatever she was feeling now.

Which, to be fair, wasn't much.

She wasn't feeling anything at all.

It felt like, after she had exhausted all the tears behind her eyes, once Harry had walked out forever from her front door, a weird type of calm had descended upon her, taking away all her feelings and leaving her feeling numb.

Hadn't she considered it ridiculous, she might have thought that her body was undergoing some type of shock - but it felt a bit too extreme, experiencing all that over the end of a friendship. Granted, it had been extremely important for her, and she had cared (still cared?) about Harry more than she had ever cared about anyone - or, actually, she had cared about him in a different way than she did all of her other friends. But it still felt a bit extreme.

And, truth be told, she would much prefer experiencing pain, crying everyday and letting it out, someway, because as it was going right now, she knew that something inside of her was wrong, but since she couldn't feel it, she didn't know how to fix it. And she feared that, by the time she would start finally feeling it, it'd be too late and she'd be ruined beyond any type of repair.

So, as things went, she had been navigating her days like a boat adrift, bereft of any type of direction. She went on with her life, because she knew she couldn't stop - if anything, she had to take care of Theodore, who was probably the strongest tether she had with her everyday life - but for the rest, she knew she was growing more and more distant than she had been right after the disaster had happened at the end of the previous year.

She was also pretty annoying to be around, she realized that.

Her friends weren't saying anything to her, but she felt that they must be getting annoyed with her. And yet, she couldn't bring herself to fix the situation. She couldn't even bring herself to do anything about the things she knew should cause her happiness or anxiety.