From The Start (George Daniel/Matty Healy)

3: it gets sad but also domestic im sorry

Overwhelmed is perhaps the only word he could use. The only word he could place, because despite this being his job - words, and the matter of placing them, the matter of turning experiences and thoughts, and marks of a page into something, Matty was always rather lost for words when it mattered the most.

Overwhelmed. He repeated it to himself, his voice floating tentatively around the border between noise and silence, because as much as it was a thought in his head, it was more than that. It was a profound kind of emotion, a whole body kind of feeling; the thing that had him motionless in the sheets as the sun rose up into the sky: horizon streaked with varying tones of golds, oranges, and pinks. There was beauty in the sunrise. There was certainty in it too. The sun would rise. Always.

He held onto that as he let his head move deeper back into his pillow. There was a tightness in his chest, like a knot: curling in on itself, and pulling everything a breathless kind of taut. He held his whole body still as he fixated on breathing: the steady rise and fall of his chest, the steadiness of everything, the certainty of it all.

In. Out. In. Out. In. Out.

His mind was clearer with the addition of oxygen, and his eyes began to register light properly, colours forming as they should, instead of inky blobbed messes. He wasn't quite sure as to exactly how he'd come to find himself awake again; the lines between sleep and consciousness were blurred and hazy - there was never a certain point to it, never any reliability, nothing he could hold onto.

He needed that. Needed things like that. Reliability, control, knowledge of his own safety, needed to know, needed the calm, needed the sunrise, needed the sunset, and not the inbetween: days passed by in shades of grey, in nothingness, in a blur, in routine, and monotony, in nothingness that lay thick like smoke, choking him. Yet he needed it. He needed it to be so.

Because clarity and the open, and the feeling of something real against his skin had his whole body on edge: overwhelmed, laying awake come dawn, because his mind was loud, loud and screaming in the overwhelming silence of it all, because his thoughts never stopped: coming in hordes and tearing him down, because there was a desire and there was a need: an urgency, an obligation in this all; he had to worry, and he had to overthink, he had to lose himself in all of this, and he had to stand by and let it happen.

He was so very caught up in his own head, and now so very used to just leaving his own thoughts and worries strewn around messily, like junk in the house, like magazines on coffee table, like plates in the sink, because that's how he lived, and that's how he let himself be: messy and destructive, cutting himself off as he secluded himself within his own mind: consumed with thought and worry.

But it was different now. Off puttingly different: bitterly different - the kind of different that brought nervous tremors and a constant sense of falling in the pit of his stomach. And Matty hated it; he hated to make it about him, he hated to build things up like this, to assign such things so much worth and power inside his own head, but he did, and he was helpless in doing so, because the clear root of this all was, George.

George who tidied the magazines and cleaned the dishes, and put everything back in order, who made the house- Matty's house look like it did last year, who made it look presentable, who made it look they had their lives together and organised. And perhaps Matty should have been thankful for George cleaning his fucking house, but it wasn't like that, it meant more than that, it was George, coming back and sorting everything out, getting it clean, taking things back to how they were, how they 'should have been', and Matty didn't want to let him - didn't want to let him fix things and look at Matty like he could put his head back together and tie his worries down, because he couldn't, because Matty didn't want to be 'George's Matty' anymore... whatever that meant.