In This World (Harry Styles)

25

(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.)

*******

And oh, my heart is afraid

Of leaving my love at the gates

When time comеs to be

Meet where sky bеcomes sea

Where Sky Becomes Sea - Palace

Un-bloody-believable. These nutjobs had really made it here somehow and caught him in bed with a man. A dude. And not just any dude, but Harry Fucking Styles. Me?! How was this reality?? Honestly, I couldn't decide how to feel just now. Not even a year ago, I'd probably be shitting myself over how Z would react in a situation like this. How he would blame me or overcompensate to rectify the predicament like he always did, wholly uncaring of how shitty his resolutions made me feel in the meantime. His reputation and ego and the perception of his family were the only things that mattered to him at the end of the day. This would've torpedoed us.

To be seen with him in such a position would've not only ended our relationship, but he would've buried me. There would be no end to his penance or over-correcting, like after my last album. He would've found some way to say I'd cornered him into it. That'd I'd kept him from doing the right thing like being home with the mother of his child, just like he had blamed me in the past for trying to stop him from marrying Perrie. Gaslit me into thinking I was the problem and that us hooking up was totally my fault. Because I was too seductive, or clingy, or manipulative, or whatever the hell he'd cooked up in his mind to tell himself that if I weren't in his life, he would've never slept with a man. Not in a million years, nor a hundred different lifetimes. Not even in the fucking multiverse.

He failed to grasp that his twisted little rationale on the matter meant it was perpetually my fault whenever things went wrong between us. That's the way I'd perceived it. Since I was a bloody kid. That I'd tainted him. That I was the difficulty in his life who had robbed him of his precious normalcy. I thought back to the farewell letter I'd written him after treatment earlier this year, back when I was seeking a healthy closure under the guidance of my therapist, and remembered how pathetically I'd capitulated and accepted the blame. Yielded with such ease to someone who'd battered me so horribly all along. My therapist hadn't vetted the letter, but I suspected he would've been none too pleased with me. More than therapy, or the input of concerned friends, or the countless nightmares, or the hundreds of times I'd cried myself to sleep over the years, it had ultimately taken time and separation from him and our volatile past for me to see how ghastly I'd been treated all along. And the cherry on top of my epiphany had been meeting a total stranger on a whim one day in a reeking hotel room full of Japanese hookers. Truth be told, were it not for the way Z had treated me, I would've never met Gray and shared these magnificent, life-altering experiences with him, and that alone led me to regret my past less and less, with each passing day.

The broader application of this mindset was so freeing, when I considered the nature of my sexuality and where I would go from here, post-Z. The possibilities made my outlook for the future much brighter. What did it all mean for my relationship with men in general, and whether or not loving one was a real possibility, or even what I truly wanted? I was beginning to realize,: the answer was yes. Indeed, it's exactly what I wanted, and my experiences with Z only made that clearer, but in the worst of ways. The sheer juxtaposition of my time with Gray had illuminated how badly I'd been beaten down before, and how mistaken I was to believe there was something wrong with me having the audacity to fall in love a man. And for believing I had selfishly tainted that man in daring to doing so. I cannot believe how long I'd lived under that falsehood, self-flagellating because of it the entire time.