#boy is it raining out while you're sad because you're sure a pathetic fallacy

[coffeeandcalligraphy]

harrison get thee to a therapist pt. 1:

“So what?” Harrison knows she could mean so many things. So raw. So indelicate. So tense. So like we’re a VHS set in reverse.  “This isn’t a big deal. No one was hurt.”

“You cannot come and go as you please in other people’s houses, Harrison.” She can’t even look at him. He could call her out by name again—Suzanna, Suzanna, Suzanna. She winces every time he does, plays it off as a sudden headache or a flighty twitch.

“Isn’t that what I do at your place?” he says instead, his throat heady with the need to scream, or perhaps cry. “Parade around as your son and then crash on the couch?”

“Harrison,” Suz says. Her eyes are pellets of amber, her pupils preserved in their warmth. As a child, Harrison climbed onto the bathroom counter, pried his own eyes open between his chewed fingernails. The colour was wrong, too light, too cold, too much like his father’s—and what was a father? God is as much a father as he is a traitor to his own sacrificial son. Harrison stood there for so long his eyes stung, and when his lid eventually snapped back in place, the world stippled.

“What?” he asks now. Where the hell is God in this dim bathroom? Sucked up in the fan? Hiding in shower drain hairballs? And where is his father? Both perpetually missing like a television remote, a set of house keys. That’s right. God’s not here—not in the olive wall paint, not in the patterned hand towels, not in the piranha portrait above the toilet tank, not against Harrison’s chest like he used to be. He’s the only one here in front of his mother, all seven of Mary’s sorrows etched into a man. He almost laughs. “And my name is kind of idiotic, isn’t it? Harry’s son—but I’m nobody’s son.”

“You’re my son.”

“For the last two weeks, sure.”

tonight's BODY BACK session excerpt!