Published March 29, 2020
(DISCLAIMER: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. It's important to remember this is all totally fabricated, embellished, and exaggerated for entertainment purposes.)
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"Don't know where you're laying...just know it's not with me. Don't know what I'd tell you if I passed you on the streets. I don't want your sympathy, but you don't know what you do to me..."
"Don't know how you taste when...there's smoke in your perfume..."
Harry Styles | Anna
February 14, 2016
Smoke trapped in his cologne...it had been there tonight like always, and the things it had unearthed in me were seismic, to say the least. It housed every memory I ever nurtured of him, and it had been all I could do to refrain from breaking the moment I sensed it.
My scent was mingled in their too, or so I had deluded myself into believing. He had become so much a part of me I could hardly tell where he ended and I began. It pervaded all I knew of us and was the thing I favored most. In those days, we had been interlocked on a sacrosanct level—one mind, one goal, one unit. Sometimes down to the cellular—he and I spending hours in bed, our bodies sticky with the heat formed in our refusal to part.
Back then, I genuinely knew what it meant to call someone my other half and be inept without them. For me, he was that which made my world bearable, and as it stood, there still wasn't a more rational way of describing him. Trust that I had wracked my brain to find one.
Despite "other halves" being boasted about in books and movies, in reality, it was a rare phenomenon. And it had nothing to do with being soulmates. That's all bullshit. In my search for relatable stories after I'd gone off the deep end, I found that no one ever meant "other half" in the way that I meant it. Many claimed it in the early stages of mediocre marriages and fated relationships, but few actually knew what it entailed to rely on another human to make up the rest of you.
How was I so sure they didn't know? Because they spoke of it as though it were charming or dignified. It was neither. For me it was vicious. Weak-willed, dependent—demoralizing. Only exacerbated by the fact that I could never own up to it before. Not to him, and least of all myself. For your eyes only.
How is it that I wanted to confide in him things that I didn't even want myself to hear? How is it that I longed to be around him, when I didn't even want to be around myself most days? This was an illness and ought to be treated as such. He had taken control right away, and in all the years I remained under his influence, I had no idea the damage it would inflict when he finally decided to walk away.
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Earlier tonight after the gala, as I stood in the empty iHop parking lot watching HIS car pull away, something had drawn me forward, making me stumble after him. For a while it exhorted me to follow his taillights, weaving throughout traffic in abandonment of my good sense. But I remained where I was, feet planted.
Those taillights were long gone. Already lost to traffic—endless LA traffic, which even at this hour proved nothing short of pandemonic. Those lights were lost among hundreds, in a kaleidoscope of similar town cars all headed in the same direction—away from me. I faltered for a while, and now all that blared in my mind was Lykke Li's, "I Follow Rivers" like it had when I was seventeen.
The lyrics took on new meaning; music being the only medium capable of making sense of what I was experiencing. Serendipity. Emotions larger than life. Magnetic currents pulsing through me and drawing me closer to him after all this time.
"Oh I beg you, can I follow? Oh I ask you, why not always? "
"Be the ocean, where I unravel. Be my only, be the water where I'm wading."
"...I follow you deep sea baby... I follow you dark doom honey...I follow you..."
I remember the year I discovered the song, envious of whoever penned it. I coveted that love in secret, wanting to feel something equally as eviscerating, so that I too was capable of writing such lyrics. At last, here I was. Wish granted, yet feeling craven and inadequate while he was self-whole.
I never anticipated the ancillary feelings typically attached to love. Unspeakable love. Tongue-tying, logic-defying love. The sort of love that sustained you and filled you so much it made food an afterthought. There was just no accounting for how overwhelmed I was after seeing him. No one would understand, so as usual there was absolutely no one to confide in.
This song was all I knew for now, the only language I spoke. I felt the tempo in my veins, awash with a sudden euphoria. It was all I could do to refrain from dancing and singing at the top of my lungs until passersby yelled at me to stop, or Jeff found me and had me committed. As usual I swallowed it all, maintaining a steely composure.
His phone had rang twice in a row as I sat beside him in the backseat of his car, arrested by his presence. He silenced it the second time around, but by then I was inwardly fuming at whomever was calling. Afterwards, he had given me that signature half-grin; slightly apologetic, letting me know he was embarrassed by the disruption, and that he valued our time together as much as I did. Sadly, it fell to me to decipher all things in his body language, since he was still insufferably laconic (and insufferably beautiful). Hadn't changed a bit in that regard.
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As I sat on the floor in my bedroom that night, contemplating all that had happened hours before, "If I Could Fly" was up next on my playlist and I paused to listen to every word, cringing whenever I heard the other boys mishandling my sentiments out of ignorance, and singing the words I had borne in my soul for years untold.
Liam had been the most suspicious of the three, and with good reason. Truthfully, I'm sure he had figured it all out by now, since many times he had the unique misfortune of witnessing questionable things between HE and I backstage, and even admitted to getting emotional while recording this particular track in 2015. He also tended to look at me with a certain amount of despondence after March, which sealed the notion for me. I hated to be pitied, so I avoided him once we all split.
In the beginning it was easier to dupe the others, since things were always so confusing between he and I that no one on the outside ever suspected a thing. We just didn't look like we were involved, and in truth, most days we weren't. Pride had governed our actions, forcing us to bluff and feign indifference in public, not wanting to be the first to break after we fought—not wanting to be the one who cared the most. As a result, sometimes our onstage chemistry suffered and became glacial, yet this generally worked to conceal our involvement.
When we were younger our relationship consisted of a haphazard routine: lots of flirting, sometimes fumbling in the dark, sometimes kissing each other until we were breathless beneath the sheets. Back then, it hardly ever went beyond making out, and usually faded by the light of day. The morning after, we would always laugh it off and return to business as usual.
Often, we'd blame our indiscretions on boredom, loneliness, alcohol, experimentation—and whatever else was convenient really. And since neither of us had the balls to put this thing (this staving, obscene thing that overtook us) beneath a microscope, it grew without hindrance and began to affect other aspects of our lives. The older we got, the more discerning we were, the more compunction we developed, and so the things that stood between us became convoluted. They were no longer so easy to let go of in the daylight.
Our resolution was simple really: never discuss it. And in refusing to talk about it, we failed to define it; so it never technically went away. Rather, it subsided at times—filtering to a lull—but was always just below the surface. Festering and spreading to other parts of us like an untreated wound naturally would.
By definition, he was never really my "bro". Hell, he was hardly even a bandmate; eventually coming to inhabit a realm in my life of his own making. He was more like a bedmate and a mentor. A soulmate and a partner-in-crime. Simply put: he was everything.
We were unwholesome together. That part I knew. It became clear in 2014 when he was treated poorly in the band, and consequently began starving himself and disassociating from the others. I spent so much time defending him and pushing for a major hiatus behind the scenes so he could get well again, that I never stopped to realize how far gone I was or that I was becoming ill with stress myself.
Somehow, I had fallen into of the Cult Of Zayn, and needed no convincing to commit a large portion of my life to this affiliation. And although in quiet I fancied it to be so, the word "lover" was never suitable for him. He was too elusive at times to be called "lover." Too unattainable. Too detached. Too careless with my feelings and too preoccupied with other relationships for me to ever really call him "mine". But I was content with my slice, and would do (and had done) ungodly things to protect it.
"I know I'm not your only...but at least I'm one..."
Harry Styles | Just A Little Bit Of Your Heart
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In the early days, he taught me everything he knew, sympathizing with what it was like to have grown up without a brother. Whatever it was I may have taught him, (and I'm sure it was plenty) paled in comparison to the array of things I picked up in his company, just by virtue of his age and diverse heritage.
To some degree, he taught me the essentials of boyhood—like the little things my dad left out, or the things my mom hoped I'd never learn. Stuff like how to smoke a cigarette and roll a joint. How to cook with curry and ride a skateboard. How to pick out good produce and decent shoes (sans my mom's input). How to style my hair differently and how to accessorize, although I never got the gist of it in those days.
The older we got, the more pragmatic his teachings became. He bought me my first set of pots and pans for my new house, encouraging my love of cooking because his mom had granted him a mutual appreciation of culinary arts. Some nights we'd just stay in alone and have heated cook-offs, fighting and making up, growing impatient of each other's kitchen habits and blasting classic rock or dancehall from the 90s.
Sometimes we'd spend all night making up new tattoo designs, or spray-painting random sh-t around the neighborhood, and driving to different cities to steal ideas for blueprints of our future houses. Those were the best sort of dates we could manage in our alone time. That is, after all other demands had been met; such as wining and dining girls, meeting up with family and friends, and working around the clock between tour dates.
But what I appreciated most about this ongoing transaction where we exchanged bits of knowledge, culture, and strange intimacies through the years, was that he introduced me to a world of new music; especially hip hop, reggae, old school R&B, and artists like Prince and Gregory Isaacs. His musical tastes married mine and became the soundtrack of my coming of age, were my solace during the darkest days of our relationship, and now captivated every memory I possessed of him, (and those of the band).
The secrets of us were written on my heart and under my skin; he being the first non-professional I ever allowed to tattoo me. The pain had been intoxicating but welcome, because I trusted him beyond reason, and relished the idea that he had begun to trust me too. Tattoos were yet another addiction for us, and in this regard, we were wildly codependent.
Over time that trust evolved, and became so potent that when we weren't stealing each other's girls, we were actively finding hookups for each other (always making sure our dates brought a friend along). A few times we ended up sleeping with our respective dates in the same room, and that forged a bond between us that seemed a step beyond the few times he and I had fooled around ourselves. Absolute hedonism was what we pursed together in those days, and since it was light years beyond the brotherhood we shared with the other boys, it enthralled me. Unduly.
Watching the way he was with females awakened in me a fathomless curiosity and a yearning whose nature I was equally powerless to define. Mainly because it hadn't been cautioned in textbooks, or in Sex Ed., or in the awkward talks my dads both put me through before I moved to London. By 2012, when I began to feel pangs of jealousy whenever I saw him with a new girl, I knew I was doomed.
I would have never imagined when he gave me pointers on how best to go down on a girl, that he would also eventually instruct me on how to go down on him as well—(at my urging, of course). Once things shifted and got "real" between us, I just wanted to please him in every way I could. I owed him that much. He always went out of his way to make sure I wanted for nothing, and this was the best way I could think to repay him.
To this day, a few facts remained: he was the most explorative and attentive lover I ever had. He was the first guy I'd ever kissed, and the only one who'd ever been inside of me, (and the only one who'd ever watched me be with a girl). And because he had been there in my formative years, helping to mold with his bare hands the very man I would become, no one else could ever fill this bizarre role. This is what made him impossible to replace, and equally as impossible to live without.
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Now it was getting late, or technically, early since it was already morning. I stretched across the floor and grabbed my phone from the charger, only to scroll to our final text thread. Basic instinct. Reading things in hindsight made me realize how much of it would be indecipherable to an outsider. There were so many broken bits of dialogue. So much unspoken affection and anger. So many subtexts interconnecting the texts; layering in a toxicity that eroded our relationship from the inside out. In those days we had been entirely ignorant of its presence, so we never foresaw its ultimate effect: the end of us.
I scrolled deeper into the past, and there was so much sweet talk. So many aborted expressions of hate. God, I hated him. I figured we spoke in incomplete thoughts most of the time, because it was rare he and I weren't thinking the same thing. "In a bit." Was ironically the last thing he'd ever sent to me, days before he left for good.
That night we met and watched a Western from the 60s—one that I had watched with my stepdad too many times to count. I nearly lost my mind over Ennio's score when it was joined with the harmonica halfway through the film, but Z had fallen asleep, sprawled across my lap like a dying cat.
He seemed to have more limbs than the average person, and twice as many lungs. Since he smoked, his breaths were gusty and often labored. Flowing out across the bed, making waves in the peace of whatever we were. In that late-night sanctity where we were untouchable and accountable to none but each other.
Those breaths became faint snores and sniffles and little bits of unintelligible speech. He talked a lot in his sleep—probably more than his waking self—and I liked staying up to make sense of whatever I could. This was the last normal thing we'd done together, and it was achingly perfect.
Thinking back before that night, and even before 2015, I recalled he had been quick to smile and naturally disposed to lightheartedness. But like me, time had changed that. The older we grew, the easier it became to remember a reason not to smile. Anxiety, they called it. And now there was always some urgent thing to be dealt with, some obstacle to be overstepped—infringing on the optimism that once undergirded our youth. Gone were the days of blissful ignorance and naivety. Now we were all too pensive and given to moodiness. And now people liked to call him sulky.
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Every breath I took, I expelled it slowly to reset. The bedroom air was crisp, but I longed for it to be dank with the poor ventilation of my stepdad's cellar; a low-ceiled spaced bathed with the white light of a shade-less bulb. I recognized so much of myself in that room, for it had been the genesis of us. The quiet where he had first kissed me.
There he had taken me into his hands and shaped what my perspective on love and intimacy was to become. Redefining my sexuality in a way that would torment me for years with fear, confusion, unbearable longing, and guilt. What did we know? Nothing. We weren't ready for it all. If he had been wet behind the ears, then I was infantile. What did I know of anything? Of affection? Of sneaking around in unlit places? Of meeting in hotel corridors after hours? Of kissing boys who really liked girls but had made an exception for me?
Shortly after he'd kissed me in late 2011, he had picked up smoking and never put it down again. After I begged him, he gave me my first hit in the lounge of the tour bus while everyone else was asleep. I choked and when my eyes watered, I remembered he had cautioned me it was no good. That it looked a lot cooler than it tasted, and damn if he wasn't right. The idea of sucking poisoned smoke into my body lost its novelty the second it hit my system. Why would anyone willingly inhale something so sickening?
For us both—and for different reasons—nicotine became an old friend. A toxic one that you could never really fallout with completely. It was always present, coaxing us back into its company with promises of allayed nerves and tasks for idle hands whenever you felt socially awkward. I liked when he smoked because it was the stuff of indie films and those old grainy biopics on rockstars from the 70s. By the same token, it was a hallmark of true grit and simply embodied the romance of all eras.
And it kept him from being unnerved on the road. I was addicted by association——again, the lines between he and I having blurred long ago, to such an extent that I yearned for a smoke most hours of my worst days. Though I rarely indulged, it was very difficult to quit a habit you didn't actually have.
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