Aquarelle [h.s]

fifty-three

In May I finally had a few of my paintings displayed in another art exhibition, in Manchester this time.

Surprisingly enough, Harry decided that the best thing for us to do would be to stay at his old house instead of getting a room in a hotel, so that's what we ended up doing, even though the idea of sleeping in his house made me a bit uncomfortable. It wasn't the building itself, but because I knew the meaning it held to him, and I didn't want him to get overwhelmed or feel like I was invading his space by agreeing to live in his family house with him for a couple of days.

The first thing we did when we arrived was to go upstairs to put the suitcases in the master bedroom, that we'd completely repainted and refurnished the summer before. At first Harry had been a bit hesitant at the thought of changing his parents' bedroom and I'd made sure to tell him he didn't have to do anything he didn't want to do, but he'd seemed rather determined in changing its looks back then and, considering he was now comfortable enough with it to sleep in it because of it, I couldn't find a single part of myself thinking that it'd been a bad idea.

"What is it?" I asked him gently, not missing the way he'd gone silent in the second he'd put his suitcase down on the floor of the bedroom.

"Nothing, it's..." he started, but his voice died out quickly, a frown on his face. He stopped with his hand on the handle of the window, not making a move to remove it or open it. "I didn't think I could have good memories connected to this place" he said quietly after some instants. "This house used to scare me, which I suppose doesn't make sense considering I've lived in it for years. But it did."

I gave him a little nod, not daring to interrupt him but listening to him attentively as he spoke. I knew by then that the best thing to do was to let him talk whenever he felt like sharing something, because even the slightest interference could've led to him not continuing.

"And then you came in here with me for the first time and brought light even into the darkest rooms, and I ended up wondering if it'd be possible for me to drown out the bad memories with good ones" he went on, still looking out of the window. "So I guess me renovating this house was me trying to make this place become somewhere I wouldn't be scared of being in. Does it make sense?"

"It does make sense" I agreed with him. It did make a lot of sense for him to change his mind about selling that house - it was his family's house, after all. It was the place he'd grown up in, where he had shared memories of his parents, the only place he felt like he truly belonged to. He couldn't get rid of it just like that.

"I think... I don't want to give up on this house yet" Harry said, finally turning around to look at me. "I'd always thought I could've never come back to it. That I would've never been able to spend a single other night in here. Everything in here used to haunt me, but I didn't dare to change a thing." He walked towards the bed and sat down on it, pursing his lips, seemingly lost in thought. "Then we started renovating it and changing everything, and I realised that I had it all wrong. For some reason, I'd thought getting rid of the things in here would've been unacceptable, because how could I destroy what my parents created?"

He paused and furrowed his eyebrows, and I took as my opportunity to sit down next to him, grazing his leg with mine to show him he wasn't alone. He didn't say a word about it, but the corners of his lips turned up into a little smile.

"But then... then we started doing just that, and I realised that it doesn't matter, because my parents aren't in the furniture, or in the walls, or in the books. I'll never forget them for as long as I'll live, regardless of the looks of this house."

"It's okay" I was quick to reassure him as soon as he was done speaking, "I'm very proud of you, and I'm very happy to know you chose to keep this house. It's the right thing to do."