#blackoutdays

You just ever hear a song and just feel like you're in a dream? Well that's what this song feels like to me.

Steve lets his head fall into his hands, the need to cry accepting slow death and strangulation instead of release, unfair exchange that is a constant in his life. He’s good at this, at swallowing. Keeping dead things inside, rather than letting them go. Like the bird he found, once. Small and frozen solid at the base of a tree in Aspen. Steve had lost his gloves, so his hands were red from touching snow, they burned with the icy bite of white and as he wandered, he found a little bird, fallen from the tree. Dead, solid, quiet. Inanimate. Steve took it back to the cabin, curled in his frost-bitten fingers, eight years old and gripped by the loss of something he never even had. He wrapped the bird, a woodpecker, in cashmere; sat by the fire and stroked it’s silky feathers, willing life back where it had been once. And while he waited, he told himself the bird would be his friend, it would go with him everywhere when he travelled, he would keep it in his coat pocket and feed it seeds, all kinds. They two, always and forever, alone no more. Steve named the bird Peck and he waited, hoped, squeezed his eyes so tight they hurt and begged to a god he still believed in then, for his friend to breathe, wake, come back. The bird was dead, though. It couldn’t come back. And Steve couldn’t let go, all the same. He kept Peck for weeks, wrapped in navy blue cashmere, right beside his pillow every night. He spoke to it, drew pictures of how it might have looked once, before. In flight, wings out, soaring through the air. Just because it was dead, didn’t mean it had to be alone. Steve worried all the time about the loneliness of still things; those objects unable to go and seek their own friends, their own fun. The bird was dead and it would never fly again, but it could still be Steve’s friend. He remembers the day his Dad found the bird, traced the smell to the sorry bundle within his Mom’s missing scarf. He remembers his Dad yelling, taking it away while Steve screamed, while he fought until his Dad screamed right back, eyes wide, like the grown man was afraid of his tiny child. He remembers his Dad throwing the bird and scarf in the outside trash and then furiously firing the Nanny they’d hired for this ski trip. Steve went through the trash that night, bare feet burning in the fresh snow, the skies above dully orange and heavy with more of that killer white. He remembers how he cried when he couldn’t find Peck. Filth on his hands, up his wrists, old rotten food, but one of his parents knew he’d come back and try, so they moved it elsewhere, too far for Steve to follow or find. He’d cried and said sorry over and over. Until he fell asleep in the snow. He doesn’t have any memories after that for a while. Steve Harrington was never any good at letting go.