Reticent (h.s fanfic, punk Harry)

Chapter 25

I didn't wait for a text pondering on the line of him arriving and what time. I sat solemnly in the gloomy diner and waited for him. Of all the cynical views this amazing city provided, Harry chose one that a rat would call a dump. With all the derogatory thoughts put away at a dark section of my mind, I focused on the numb waitress who stood drained in front of an old man in a trench coat, waiting quite impatiently for his order, waiting and waiting. I let my mind wander off. For a moment I envisioned my soul in her dreary body. Trapped behind the hideous facade of patience. I could start to tingle with the pretence emotions. The futile attempt of smiling. The exhausted way my body dragged down. In my mind, where I was this girl, I was enraged at the man, and somewhat frightened of him. In my mind-or perhaps hers, he seemed so crucially fixed. So hideously put together, bundled in a mass he called life, so to shrivel out and be called death.

She seemed to look both ways with a sigh then at him. I made it a game, and again I transferred to her. She was looking for a way out, any way to avoid all the fatalistic tragedies. I could feel the ambience of the cafe, the desolate depressed feel of it all. I seemed to get lost in the texture of her life. The way she didn't upturn her lips, but only give a nod and walk off. Or the way she held her hands together while he spoke without spreading them even an inch. She looked contemptuous of the way she lived. She seemed so fed up. I had only some ways to relate to her, but at the same moment I had no way of understanding her. Why was this girl such a cynic? Why was she so scornful? Her eyes wandered again, and this time they travelled to me. For the first time I didn't get bothered by being caught. I let her stare at me while I stared at her. Her eyes were dark, brown irises looking bland. The bags under her eyes looking too insolent. Her black hair looked dead, dyed too many times.

I decided to look away for a moment, and soon so did she.

I put away my imaginations, turning now to focus on the salt and pepper on the table. I busied my hands with pushing them around, switching the salt and pepper positions. It was quite boring. I set that down now.  I looked over to see that now the girl was going back with a muffin and coffee. The man didn't exhilarate in its arrival, but accepted with a nod and courteous smile.

For a whimsical moment I wondered why it had been so easy for my emotions to overtake and bold in her body, while in my own they were trapped like birds. My emotions were mine, I could show them, I could understand them...but I didn't.

I didn't understand what sentiment I felt with harry. My feelings were jumbled with him. Sometimes I didn't feel them at all, and then I'd focus, and then I'd forget all about my feelings and forget it all, focusing on nothing at all. My mind wandering into abyss

Harry
When I'd watched American Beauty, the ending seemed rash, maybe hastened, the whole concept of his death made absolute no sense to me. The kissing scene made no sense, and the woman's love for her husband seemed psychotic. It seemed skeptical. But throughout the movie I realized one thing. It was easy for the man to simply walk away and empower the weak, but one tragic mishap to him, and his wife was on her knees.

Lester Burnham became a new man just by the wandering eye of a slutty teenager. A whirlwind turnaround changed him for his better and their worse. But somehow through it all, the only person that came between was their daughter. She had no way of going to him, and no way of shimmying to her. Stuck in the middle, she only wished for one thing-her father's abrupt death. I just never found out, had she really been happy then, to watch him bleed? But I suppose in a crazy way, a serene overcame her of his death, a notion that in some concept she was free-she could travel anywhere she wanted with this boy, she could conquer any troubles. But her friend was gone, her father gone, and her mother a frantic mess of guilt and mourning. How in her brain could any optimistic thought occur? How had she not relapsed into love with her father like her mother, who had some disgust for the man she called husband.