Say Yes (Nostalgic Summer Romance)

“Harley!”

Angela tried to pull me away, but it was useless. I slammed my shoulder into the wood over and over again until I was sure it would bruise the bone.

“He has to be in there. He has to be!” I screamed. Memories of our last conversation replayed like a movie reel, and I heard his words clear as day.

I wish it was me who was dead.

Urgency spiraled through me, and I started kicking the door and beating on it with my fists. “Liam! Liam!”

Suddenly, I was wrapped up in Thomas’s arms again and hauled away. I kicked and cried and thrashed against him until he dropped me to the ground in the living room.

“He’s gone, Harley,” he said, framing my arms in his hands and forcing me to look at him. “Okay? He’s not in that room, he’s not in this apartment, he’s not in this city, or for all we know, this country, anymore.”

My lips trembled, eyes watering as his words sank in.

“I’m sorry,” he added. “Really, I am.”

I closed my eyes, then, succumbing to the flash flood that took me under in the next breath. Thomas caught me as my legs went limp, and Angela was right there at my side, too, rubbing my back and assuring me it would all be okay.

It’s okay.

We’re here.

You’re okay.

It’ll all be okay.

But all I heard was the irrefutable truth that I didn’t know how to survive.

He’s gone.

The Art of Despair

A few days later, the sun came out again.

Florence residents welcomed it with smiles and towels laid out at the park, ready to bask in its glow. I wished it would have stayed away, stayed hidden behind the dark clouds that had covered us for nearly a week now. Those clouds were my friends. Those clouds soothed me with a there, there as they tucked me into my depression and left me be.

The sun was pushy. It was cheery and bright, poking me until I reluctantly rolled out of bed, ate breakfast, and numbly walked to class like I had all week. I could see it in Professor Beneventi’s eyes that he was worried about me, that he knew something was off, but he didn’t question it. And when I asked him sheepishly after class if he knew where Liam was, he frowned in sympathy and simply shook his head.

Emotion.

The word ebbed and flowed in my gut like a foamy sea later that night as I sat at my easel, The Score album by Fugees playing softly from my stereo.

Emotion.

I tried to swallow it down as it bubbled up furiously, ready to burst. My eyes drifted in and out of focus as I stared at the letters spelling Kodak on the golden-yellow and red envelope in my hand.

Emotion.

It grabbed me by the throat when I pulled out the first picture, one of me eating a panini con lampredotto. My eyes were wide and timid, the flash making the pupils of them bright red.

I didn’t even know that girl anymore.

I watched her morph right in front of my eyes as I flipped through the stack of photographs, watched her smile get brighter, her eyes softer, her soul freer. My heart jumped up into my throat at the sight of our first picture together, each of us with our rice necklaces, and it stayed there as I flipped the rest of the way through.

A long night of painting, frozen in time.

My flushed cheeks in a dark bar the night of the opening ceremony.

His lips on mine, hands wrapped around my waist with the sun shining on the Tuscan hills behind us.

A single tear slipped free when I saw that one, silent and quick. It rolled over my cheek and dripped off my jaw onto my lap before I could reach up to catch it.

Emotion.

That was our assignment, one that seemed so simple when the professor first explained it.

Everything about it terrified me now.

I was no stranger to my emotions. I could tap into them easily. I knew when I was scared, or sad, or angry, or elated. I wasn’t afraid to share those emotions.

But I’d never felt emotion like this.

I spread the photos all around me, lining my desk, littering the floor beneath my stool, taping a few to the bottom of my easel. And when I was surrounded by memories that would only ever be just that — a blurry, pixelated version of what really was — I realized the futile truth.

There were no words for this pain.

Of course, many had tried to find them, tried to string consonants and vowels together, to form a combination of syllables that could encompass this indescribable state of being.

Heartbroken seemed to be the one that came closest to the truth, but it still failed to do the job.

I understood where that word came from. It was that feeling of weight on your chest, the splitting of your rib cage, the way your heart seemed to be tied up in restrictive chains, keeping it from fully beating the way it once did before.