In This World (Harry Styles)

10

(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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Well it's hard when you've got that pain

Like a thorn in your side

And it's calling out your name

And it burns like a fire

Well I can't take it away

It's a shadow in the night

But I can tell you, I keep on climbing now

Climb on Your Tears - The Paper Kites

That night, I lay across my bed shaken with hankerings for even a drop of alcohol. Mind reeling off the rails with how I could get my hands on any in this hopeless, podunk, joke of a town. The hilarity of him bringing me here was in the end a cruel irony. And I was spiraling. Typical reaction for me whenever I was triggered, like some angsty teenage girl with unresolvable self-esteem issues and an anxiety disorder. Reach right for the bottle, you pathetic motherfucker. Be more predictable, I dare you. Fuck's sake. I had deleted Instagram and Twitter in hopes of avoiding whiffs of what they were up to together, but tonight I'd chosen violence. Dr. Löfgren was wrong about me. My condition was altogether irremediable. I was living proof that you could literally find whatever you sought on the internet. Sometimes, you wanted the pain. The abuse. The cruel memes and roasts and baseless judgements. It ought to be the subject of an anthropological study. Our capacity to harm ourselves by seeking out the most callous corners of the web to gratify our self-contempt.

I'd gone online for the first time and searched out their media-trained announcement posts; something I knew would flay me. Hers had been expected, but his...well, it hadn't. He'd somehow avoided posting about the pregnancy throughout its entire duration, likely out of pity for me. But he had finally dared to make a post for the announcement. Somehow his decision to not post all along made this one moment of yielding and playing to the crowd that much more difficult to stomach. There had probably been a lot of pressure on him to do so, I argued. Probably her mum. It was the normal thing, after all. The thing all celeb parents did; inevitably with the same generic sentiment in the caption about welcoming a healthy baby girl or boy, and the exact same framing of the tiny newborn hand linked with their own.

I couldn't believe he was one of those people now. So...typical. We were never common. She had made him that way. Hollow. She perfectly fit the archetype of the insufferably vapid, chronically online Insta-girl with millions of botted followers, deceitfully edited photos, and the unironic use of impish filters. So her post had been predictable and therefore anticipated, but his had hit me like a ton of bricks. The tiny hand holding his tatted finger. I was rushed by a sinking sensation. That dull, asphyxiating clench in the stomach as you plummeted mid-air. It was selfish of me of course, but all I could think was that I would never experience that with him. He'd been there, done that——and he'd done it without me.

I might've been somewhat alright if I'd stuck to the plan and stayed off their profiles after the news had broken, but over time the temptation became overpowering. Besides, there was constantly someone congratulating them. Constantly someone posting collages that traced the timeline of their destined relationship right up until they'd had the miracle baby. Companies celebrating the birth. Tons of our mutual celeb friends reposting things like their social credit scores depended on it. Her family sharing photos of the immediate aftermath, declaring her a warrior. A warrior...imagine that.