Lacryma

The story begins with an ending: Harvey dies.

The story will end with a beginning—it is important to see how he lived from this point, following the steps backwards as they occurred.

Reno and Cameron are still alive, but they don’t much feel like they are. They each loved Harvey in their own way.

So, in the end, Harvey dies. But the story comes from how the three of them lived, and the surprise is how they began.

Chapter One

Cameron was crying. She hated crying in front of other people; Claire would always scold her for it, and she always hated making him mad. But Claire wasn’t here, and Harvey was dying—“Dead,” Reno corrected—and so she couldn’t help but cry.

“Stop it, Danny!” she said. “You’re overreacting.”

“Overreacting?! Overreacting…” He tried out the word, turned it over and over again on his tongue before deciding he didn’t like the taste, and shook his head. “It’s not that I’m overreacting, it’s that everyone else is not responding.” He knew that to start out on anything, you needed more than what he had. You needed more than an uneasy feeling and only half a desire to want to actually get anything done. You need something that’s real—something that sparkles when you touch it so that you know that it’s real.

Danny didn’t have any of that. As to why he’s the hero, well, I thought it would have worked out better than that. But it didn’t, so you’ll have to live with this as it is.

So then, back to the beginning. Which is actually the middle. Maybe even a little closer to the end, but that would give too much away so I won’t say how close to the end.

Danny doesn’t have a short temper, but people think he does. He’s six-foot-one, twenty-three, has no goals in life, and doesn’t have a short temper. People sometimes thought he overreacted, but it wasn’t so much that he overreacted, as it was that he just reacted.

“You’re not supposed to have this kind of response,” she said, trying to get his attention.

“Response…? Response…” He tried this word out too, turned it over and over again on his tongue before deciding that he didn’t like the taste. “How am I supposed to respond?”

She looked down with a guilty expression in a way that let him know she didn’t know. “I don’t know…” she admitted. “Just not this kind.”

“Thanks,” he said with a smile that let her know that he wasn’t thankful at all.

“Danny—”

But he was already walking away, hands in his pockets and mind made up. Just what it was made up on, well, she didn’t know. And since I’m her, I can’t tell you why either.

She hated the night. It wasn’t so much that she was afraid of the dark, but she just hated the night. She hated to have to go to sleep. Every evening it was the same.

The pain that the darkness brought with it. The loneliness that came with setting of the sun. All of her friends went to sleep at the same time. She never knew if the night bothered them the way it bothered her. They never talked about the night. They always talked about the fresh morning and the sun and the times where there was no pain.

But as the sky darkens, she cries as she curls up into a small bundle—as she folds in on herself to try and protect herself from the oncoming night even though she knows that it’s impossible.

Every night it feels as if she’s dying.

Dying with the setting of the sun, huddled in her soft bed that no longer feels comfortable, hoping that it would end quickly.

And when the morning comes, it is all forgotten. The pain, the hatred, the fear, it is all gone. She stretches and opens up once more, turning her beautiful face towards the new sun. If she was dying every night, then she was born again every morning.