In This World (Harry Styles)

21

(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.)

*******

You and me

You and me

Nobody baby but you and me

You and Me - Penny and the Quarters

HARRY

The private balcony in our bedroom was the most spectacular view in the house. Right now heavy mists hovered over the waters and the bay was consumed by a slate gray after dawn. I camped out there most mornings and evenings, gathering my thoughts and plotting for the future. I'd have to go home eventually, and I wondered what that might be like. So much had changed and so rapidly, I was struggling to keep up with who I was becoming and whether or not I even wanted to be that guy. Where was home anyway? What was next? Where to even start? I'd been removed from my normal routine so long I almost couldn't remember it.

Things like the nightly emails to structure the following morning. The elaborate grooming rituals and spa days. The daily walk or run about town. The nighttime work sessions where I typed or played the guitar until my hands cramped. The old impromptu beach parties in Malibu where we did shrooms until we couldn't see straight or speak coherently. The skinny-dipping, the booze, the lines, the models, the karaoke, the meetings with the label and tons of fashion houses begging for brand deals. The midnight runs to diners and or dim little bars to hear local bands. Linking up with friends at all hours, all over Hollywood and London. It had all fled my character like I'd been immunized.

Although, I suppose that was the point, right? Escape me to find me? Forget me to discover me? A new me, a better me, a smarter me? One who didn't take anyone's shit and never put himself last. One who had a better hold on who he was and what exactly he wanted out of this long game called life. I was more contemplative than I'd ever been, but also so...so very unbothered. For a while I thought I'd become numb, but my time with Gray had nullified that idea. Turned it on its head really. I still felt a great deal, just not about the things I used to believe defined my world. Sometimes I thought maybe I felt things more now than I ever had. I was allowing myself to explore emotions outside of the typical expanse I'd allowed my heart to tread before. Back when I was afraid to feel anything for anyone who wasn't him. Fearful of how I'd be punished for daring to fancy another human being who didn't remind me of him in some way. Telling myself I had to see him in everyone else to validate my spending time with them. They had to look like him or sound like him or have his coloring or his eyes or his accent or attitude or his smell. Fuck's sake, the mere idea repulsed me now.

As of this year, I was a free agent, and startled by the things I'd discovered when I took my heart off a leash. That whole experience, although it had consumed a massive amount of my time and all of my capacity for loving, did not characterize me. It wasn't my end-all be-all when it came to relationships. I would not die without him, and it was comical how quickly that had been proven. I was...thriving. Happier than ever, in fact, which was a weird thing to say. But when I truly thought about it, I'd had no clue what happiness was before. It had always been an ideal I was striving for, and rarely a thing I was ever in possession of.

I was beginning to understand it didn't have to be one thing. My happiness didn't have to be wrapped up in another person, nor in my career, nor in my hobbies, nor in my self-image, nor in the pursuit of pleasure. Happiness was being. It was contentment at any state or stage. All that other stuff? It's where the dopamine came from. Viscerally good, but fleeting. Not meant to last. I was looking for serotonin. I figured true happiness was measured more by how contented you could be without all those things. Like if I were a monk and tucked away in the Tibetan mountains living as ascetic a life as possible. How gratified was I with myself irrespective to the people who came and went, or the material possessions acquired, or ever-mounting accolades, or dreams realized? Was I ok with the man I saw in the mirror regardless of all that other stuff at the end of the day? Would I be ok with him days, months, years, and decades from now? If the answer was yes...then that was true happiness to me. That was the steadfast calm I longed for now. Self-contentment and peace, independent of any thing or any person that entered or exited my life.