small world

chapter 53

I will admit when I sat down to write this chapter, I didn’t know what I was going to say, and I thought it was going to be a really short filler but it is actually quite long and there is a LOT happening. Now that it’s out there, I must say I love this one and I hope you do too! Mentally prepare yourselves for the shit storm that you’re about to read

HARRY

What a terrible thing it is to look in the mirror and be dissatisfied with the person staring back at you. I had only felt this sensation of clear disappointment in myself one other time prior to right now. It was at dawn in the middle of a London Autumn; the air was cool and the brisk wind hit the back of my arms like a slap in the face, like mother nature was doing its best to punish me for what I had done. I drove home in the still of silence, one of the only times I can ever remember being in the car without the radio playing, because there was no way I could sit through a song that would inevitably in one way or another make me think of Charlie, a song that would make me feel even more like a monster. And I was about to sneak into our apartment complex so early that the birds weren’t even chirping yet, but my arrival would be so late that the sun was up before I could even crawl into bed with Charlie, where I now know I should have been all night long. But I’d soon learn that she too hadn’t made it to our bed that night, she slept curled up on the sofa with a throw blanket still wearing her clothes from the night before, expecting me home ‘any minute now’ which sadly turned into hours. But before I walked through the door and saw her, before I watched her fall to the ground weighed down by her sadness and disappointment, drowning in a puddle of her own tears, I stood alone in the elevator surrounded by four identical images of myself reflecting back at me. And I touched the glass, and my hands met their hands. And I stared into their eyes, and my eyes met their eyes. But not one of those people were me; they were not the man my mother raised, they were not the man that prided himself on honesty or lame jokes, they were not the man that lived happily and loved fearlessly, and certainly none of them deserved Charlotte Parker.

And here I was again, standing in the bathroom with Charlie just feet away from me concealed behind the shower curtain, and I stood in front of the mirror and wiped the hot condensation from its glass, and I looked at it, waiting to find myself looking back at me, but who I saw wasn’t me at all. I saw somebody who was sneaky, unfaithful… somebody who was selfish and dishonest, somebody who didn’t deserve the girl behind the shower curtain. I looked at the person staring back at me and I saw fear of loss in their eyes, guilt across their face, and an aching, bleeding, broken heart whose blood and loves seeped through the fabric of my thin white t-shirt. I didn’t see Harry Styles, and as long as I kept this from my other half, I didn’t know when I would ever see him again.

The shower was still running as Charlie finished washing up: the steam danced around, intertwining with the sound of her melodic voice and leaked out the open door and into the bedroom where I sat on the edge of the bed waiting. Every moment where I was completely alone in my own thoughts was a dangerous one – I was completely torn by my own civil war, to come clean or to keep ignoring it. I knew that the obvious choice was to tell her but I couldn’t. I couldn’t find the words, I couldn’t stomach the thought of what she would say in return, I couldn’t stand there and watch her heartbreak and know that it had been me who had done it; she let me in when she was broken, tearing down the walls around her heart and letting me hold it in my hands – I was supposed to protect it but I had dropped it, and I knew all too well that she would let mine slip between her fingers only to shatter on the ground in her own heart’s remains.

But I shook the thoughts from my head because today was an exciting day; today was the day that we would sit down our girlfriends and tell them our big news: that we are releasing our second album this fall and doing a world tour next year. It was crazy for us to think about how fast things have been going for us; the music and the fans and the shows and ourselves were all growing constantly, and sometimes we would find a second to reflect and think, wow, this is us, this is our lives. We still had a few songs to write and a tour to design that the world would see – which was absolutely mental. When Simon called us in for a Skype meeting the other day and told us the news, he followed it with a smirk on his face, and as he shook his head he said something that I would remember word for word for the rest of my life “well boys, you were the band that lost the X Factor, but now you’ve won the world.” And in that moment we sat back in our chairs, looking over at each other with tear rimmed eyes, glowing smiles, and goose bumps dancing up our arms, because he was exactly right.