Dealing With Absence » h. styles au

36ᵀᴴ CHAPTER

                                        36ᵀᴴ CHAPTER 

                         "You raze the old to raise the new"

It doesn’t take long at all for December to come.

Actually, it’s unnoticeably fast how snow falls down into thick blankets of white covering the streets. In no time at all, Harry’s sitting down on his bed with Elisha trying – idly – to teach him how to play the guitar, or outside at the fire escape letting all of his nervousness slip through a fag, the cold crashing down and huddling all over him: from his very toes to the tips of his slender fingers as they fumble with themselves trying to find some occupation.

Soon enough he’s more caught up with constant cups of tea and scent candles than anything. The carwash is mostly empty through the day and he’s got way, way too many time left to escape to the café just across the road and throw darts at a wall.

The faster the days go, though, the more his nervousness grow.

December also means Christmas and New Years’ holidays, which leads back to family, something Harry’s not completely ready for.

He’s not ready for Cheshire and its welcoming streets, way-too-friendly people. He’s not ready for the smell of homemade cookies and the usual, embracing home-ish air of it all.

Talking to his mother through a phone had been hard enough already – without seeing her face, that is –, so he can only imagine a face-to-face meeting will be much worse.

He could stay in London, of course, but everyone’s leaving: Leesh is going back to Leeds tomorrow, and Zayn, Bradford (in two days). Dora is probably going to stay locked up into her tiny house upstairs the café, but he figures he’ll only have a limited amount of subject to discuss before they fall into uncomfortable silence and the always following pity people seem to grow for him.

Nah, he’ll pass that.

He could stay in London and figure things out, maybe find another extra job so he can speed up the paying process for his recently acquired warehouse. For the past few weekends, whenever Zayn didn’t get him into a working trip, he managed to remove all the paintings he had in his room to leave them at some corner amongst the mess he has still to clean.

The warehouse is not new, per se, and he’ll have to spend a lot of his money to fix all the holes and broken things it presents – it’ll take time, too, a lot of those and maybe patience as well –, but he’s got no hurry at all. The slower he does it, the closest to his ideals it’ll get, and maybe, someday, he’ll turn it into his gallery. His.

For now, he’ll escape from the world whenever he can, disappear into an old warehouse where he spends his hours painting – he’s back to doing so, not as naturally as before, though he’s getting there – and drawing whatever he feels like; sleeping on an improvised mattress at a room up some fragile stairs he has still to get used to.

He hangs his random photographs at an also improvised rope that goes from an extreme of the room to the other, the same one he sometimes forgets even exists and ends up in the middle of his way. (Harry always gets hit in the face, and drops more pictures than he’d like. He’s not used to that, either).

He dreams of a perfect workplace whenever he walks in there, but it’s too upsetting knowing it won’t be as easy as he’d wish. He could stay and work a while more on it through these holidays, but he knows it won’t be of much difference.