i'm really looking forward to reading what you're working on sounds very interesting... can't wait ! of course it would be very nice to read the draft you have!!!
Thank you! Sorry I meant to post this earlier but time slipped away from me. Here is a snippet from the draft, which is inspired by Joni Mitchell’s album “The Hissing of Summer Lawns,” and various other influences, especially Harry’s lyricism on his past two albums. Hope you like it.
Everytime Louis was in bed with him, he would brush away the crust from the corners of his eyes and kiss the soft scruff above his lips and say, “You’re alright?” And Harry would mumble, “Yes,” and he would kiss his lips and say, “I love you, H,” and Harry would smile a real smile and say, “I love you too… more…” and fall asleep before they exchanged any other words.
And he would wake up in that state again— a dream. Laying back on the bed, he feels light as a feather, as if he is part of the cotton gingham sheets, a ghost kicking his legs up and letting the fabric puff up and fall gently back onto his naked body. Flesh and bones feel lighter this way. When he sits up he’s a plant growing, propagating itself, limbs stretching out from his body like vines and leaves. It’s daylight afterall, a blue London morning, and Harry feels nothing in his chest of dread like he sometimes does when he’s awake.
In this flowery state of mind, he drifts down the stairs to the kitchen, where Louis would be cooking horrendous pancakes and pretending like he was doing something right. Harry, in fuzzy pale pink slippers shaped like bunny rabbits, which match the hot pink carpet of his stairs. His hair brushes the tops of his shoulders like how it used to feel years go, back when he finished growing it out, when he still felt like a kid.
He could never fully decipher how it could all feel so real. The soft touch of his feet pressing into the hardwood floors, the carpet on the stairs, brushing his fingers through his long hair, holding his body in his hands like it hasn’t changed since 22. Smelling the butter and eggs from the butchered breakfast, touching and feeling Louis’s warmth and hearing his morning voice.
“G’morning,” he says, sliding a final misshapen pancake onto a ready-made stack of them, and like a movie the motion seemed practiced.
“Hi,” Harry greets, smiling when Louis wraps his arms around his waist and kisses his cheek.
“Don’t you look lovely this morning,” Louis rasps, nose tickling his neck. That's something Harry’s brain recognizes from real life— this feeling of domesticity. It’s familiar. It’s never gone away. “How'd you sleep, hm?” Kissing his collarbone, making the hair on his arms stand up.
“Alright.” Harry doesn’t say, I’m sleeping right now, though he’s aware of it, just dimly aware of it.
“Y’magazine came in the mail.” Louis lets Harry go, arm slipping off from around his middle to gesture at the end of the countertop, where an issue of House and Garden lay wrapped up in its plastic still.
Am I a wife again? Harry wonders briefly, but answers his own thoughts by looking down at his body, which looks almost the same as it always does. Less muscly, maybe. His arms, tattooed and big around the biceps when he bends them, but delicate around the wrists and hands. And every time he looks down at his legs they look how they always do: thin, long, tan like matchsticks. A gap between them, knees often knocked together on impulse. His shoulders are still broad from the back when he takes the chance to look in a mirror in the next room, to see himself fully in this new, complete form. Himself, but not really himself. An idealized version of it, like how his body sometimes feels when he’s done meditating for an hour.
Some part of him helplessly hoped that it would be a recurring dream, waking up in this world as a woman like the first time he started having them. Feeling it as a real, genuine thing, not just some daydreams he conjured when he was too confused to articulate what he really wanted.
Despite not being a female as he half-expected he would be when he drifted off to sleep, he still feels different in this body than the one that rests, unshowered in his and Louis’s bed. He feels clean, lighter, without a weight on his shoulders that he’s been trying to shrug off since the tour ended. What he really liked about feeling a new body was his face. He touched it obsessively, feeling the softness of his cheeks. In real life, he hasn’t had the energy to shave in days. Here, he has only the softness of the skin of a peach, that soft skin above his lip— brownish-blonde hair he didn't mind seeing and feeling. Other times in this dream state, he’d be completely smooth, with not even the ghost of it there. His cheeks seemed fuller, jaw softer, the consequences of finally eating real food, made from home. Maybe that would happen in real life, he thought, when he woke up again.
After eating the pancakes Harry’s body drifts back over to the magazine, gliding in his slippers over the kitchen floor. The cover—a photograph of open French windows that lead to a glowing patio— sticks in his mind like its pages were gluey. He lays it out flat on the table as Louis washes the dishes behind him. Fingers brushing over the glossy paper, flicking until he finds a spread of a flowery garden. A saturated meadow, green Technicolor fields, and a set of white wicker chairs and tables sitting right in the center of it all. And a girl who looks just like him, with hair just as long, drinking from a tea cup of china. Watching the kids play in the yard.
When he finishes loading the dishwasher, Louis settles warm hands on Harry’s waist. Kissing his neck, whispering words into his ear about making love, having children. Things they wanted. Things they could do on this time off, until one of them inevitably had to leave again.
Harry leans back into the warm touch, into his bed, burrowing himself in the dream as long as he could if only to bask in the feeling of himself living a life he’d wanted for too long.
