INDIGO➵Harry Styles

___INDIGO___

It was a strange truth about me; a strange and hidden truth I'd carried with me across the years. An important memory was a fragile treasure. In my life, I had learned that anything and everything could change at any moment - except for a memory. A memory. I could keep it, I could nurture it and shield it from the harsh changes always thundering through my reality. Though it could be shattered in the blink of an eye, it could be preserved, untouched. And so I made every effort to keep it so.

No one seemed to understand it, when I explained, or I suppose I'd never really tried. I could not seem to put it into words. I couldn't word the overwhelming desire to keep everything I had in connection to each memory frozen in its own happy time. Then I could return to it, and the happiness would seem closer, more real... I wouldn't have to fear the hard set of the feeling in my mind that, perhaps, the moment that I was recalling so wistfully had not truly occurred or was too far for me to grasp.

My sister laughed when I left the first bouquet I received from my first boyfriend on my dresser for months. She didn't mean to be cruel, I knew that. She simply couldn't understand why I needed to leave it there. She couldn't understand why I needed to leave the bouquet of red roses there just where Aaron had set them, before lifting me into his arms, a warm, tight embrace that resonated with warmth and safety. I knew that the red of their petals would fade, as would their softness. But as change arrived, time took its commission, and the embrace was far away, the roses in the vase remained there. Aaron, my first love, the owner of so many of my firsts was gone, but there were the roses, just as he had set them. The memory was still there.

In the mornings, I would rise with the sun and wrap a sweater around my shoulders. In the warmth and light of the new day, I walked over to my roses. There, in the new day's glow, I felt closer to the past, only the parts I had chosen: the blissful parts, all new experiences and excitement and joy. Sadness was in the past, but accumulated happiness was here with me as I had chosen and kept it. Just by looking at the frozen image, I would be transported back to the cool purple twilight of my sixteenth birthday, and the warmth of my first love.

One look and I was back in the same bedroom framed by a different day, newly sixteen years of age. The soft cream curtains billowed in the cool August breeze, as the window welcomed the current through to my room. It brushed across my skin, cooling the heat of the day away. That sunset was before me again, blossoming across the sky in the clouds' purple, pink, orange and red designs. Blue settled over them, the stars ready to reside in the summer sky once more. Another day had renewed their sparkle for their return. Aaron gazed at me with pride and affection pooling in his blue eyes and glittering in his bright smile. The breeze, the sunset, the stars, and Aaron, the brightest star of all to me at the time, were all there.

The deep crimson of the roses was drained of its vibrancy, as they wilted and shriveled. They faded before my eyes day by day. The stark reality of nature and the transience of the blooms' beauty almost jarred the stillness of my memory. It was a painful truth in the face of the gift's timeless perfection to me. But I still wasn't shaken. I managed to convince myself not to be. There the vase remained, with the long dead roses withered and gone, the crystal holding them dusty and having long lost its sparkle. I never allowed anyone to move it, to disturb its tranquil repose.

And yet there it was, still close to me, within my reach, just as it had been set in a perfect time.

I continued to do this with anything I needed or loved. I made every effort I could to keep my memories close to me. I knew that I had to move on, to be alive and make more memories and live in the now. But to do that, I felt as though I needed to be accompanied by past joys.

A silver cross on a glistening silver chain lay spread across my dresser next to Aaron's flowers. It took its place there, set just as I had left it after I had removed it from around my neck on the day of my sister's wedding. My face was still flushed from the party, my body now aching and eager for my bed's soft comfort. I was still basking in the glow of Ella's marriage ceremony and our celebrations, savouring the soft hum of laughter and singing and dancing as it trickled through my veins. I wanted to keep it forever, and here I tried again.

I tried with all of it.

And so I left my room in accordance with this truth. The room I had grown up in, in which I had spent so many nights and days, was pieced together only by the memories I had left behind. From every angle, it was a museum with countless exhibits, frozen in time.

All that had composed my everyday life was shattered. Everything that I had built over the years to wake up to, was gone, without warning or exception. As my world shifted, spinning until it was upside down, I found that I had to shift with it. I could find no other option. No different choice was left to me but to run, to leave my museum and find a new self, a new world. I had to find my sunrises and sunsets elsewhere.

I left the old Indigo there with my fragments of memories. Somehow they had lost their glow, the life that I had bottled into them by preserving them. But I could never destroy them. I couldn't imagine the pain of even slightly disturbing any one of my perfectly shielded memories, that I had nurtured when nobody else understood. Perhaps my instinct to do so had been born in me as a kind of warning, before the fall of everything I had known, to try to keep everything I wanted to, every drop of happiness and stability for as long as I could, before it was ripped away from me. Someone could easily shatter them, but it would not be me.

Necklaces and old vases, dresses and paintbrushes, and scraps of tattered paper with looped handwriting all stayed as I had fought so hard to keep them.

As the night made me its captive, I gazed back at the room one last time. Gone, I would be gone. The Indigo I had made myself was to seek a new horizon.

I flipped the light switch and closed the door on my heart's museum for the last time.

As the wind whipped through my hair on my new journey, I pushed and pushed the life that had taken up residence in my heart, to leave it all behind.