Downfall [Punk Niall Horan]

67

A poem that I had in English class one year was swimming around in my brain, flashing behind my eyelids like a distant strobe light as I sat on the cold tile of the hospital floor. Tears had dried down on my cheeks, caked into them. My eyes were glazed over as I distantly stared at the human in the hospital bed in front of me that seemed so far away despite him being 3 feet away from me. My heart thudded achingly in my chest as his hard glare pinned me to my spot on the floor, but all that kept playing in my head was that one poem that seemed like just a distant memory, something I thought I had forgotten a long time ago.

It was a dark, tragic poem by Bernard Shaw. A poem about losing yourself completely, and ironically it was named Completely Lost. As I stared at a man I loved, the only one I felt anything for in the coldness that was my body now, stared back at me with no recollection of who I was. And as this moment seemed to be stuck in the continuum of time, this one specific poem kept replaying on my head in a loop because at this moment I had no idea where to go from here.

"Have you ever had that feeling?
That you are completely lost.
Your mind and senses reeling,
As in a dark foreboding frost.
Nothing but nothing is as it seems,
Words like phantoms come and go.
It is as if all the bizarre dreams,
Have turned your brain to snow.

The ticking of the mantelpiece clock,
Cuts the silence like a knife.
Your mind is in a mysterious block,
You ask yourself is this my life.
Perhaps I am just getting old,
Brain and body gone to pot,
Where are the times that I was bold,
And my brain could solve every plot."

I felt another hot tear slip down my cold cheek, but I didn't reach to wipe it away. "Harry, please. You know me," I whispered brokenly, barely recognizing my own voice. It sounded so hollow and robotic, as if nobody was actually living in my body anymore. My voice echoed in the silent hospital room hauntingly, coming back and hitting me like a sack of bricks in my eardrums.

Harry just stared at me harshly, and the confused look in his eyes told me all that I needed to know. In his mind he, in fact, did not have a clue who I was. He was tense, and I knew he was waiting for me to hurt him any second. Harry just shook his head slowly at me, and I looked to the side and bit my lip to keep from crying out.

Just about that time I heard light footsteps pounding down the barren hallway. Right as I looked up I saw a pissed off Niall bound right through the door. "Tylie Brooke Owens, what the fu-," Niall started harshly, but then his eyes locked on the papers scattered around me on the floor. The papers where my father had planned every fucked up thing that had ever happened to me. The sticky note that Harry wrote on was what Niall's eyes locked on next, and his eyes widened in confusion before they widened even more when he figured out who wrote that note.

In a flash, Niall's eyes flicked over to where a frantic looking Harry was in a forgotten hospital bed. The paper thin sheets were gripped tightly between his white fingers, as if that was his only defense to the strangers in his room. Once Niall saw that Harry was out of his coma, his shoulders dropped in great relief as if he had been holding the world up for months and he was finally getting a break. Which he technically was because Harry survived, but then his shoulders immediately drew back up when he saw that Harry was scared of who appeared to be a stranger in front of him.

How funny of him to immediately resume his role as Atlas.

All of this happened in under a minute.

"Tylie..," Niall started more sadly this time, his face morphing into a more concerned one instead of an angry one. I just felt hollow though when he said my name. I should have wanted him to comfort me because this wasn't what I was expecting when Harry finally woke up, and I was hurting that this was how it turned out. But I didn't want him to. I only felt anger towards him. Anger because Harry ended up like this because I once was so in love with Niall. Right now, though, I had no idea where that Love had gone.