The Timeline

45.

December 2016:

If you were to ask Harry how he feels in this particular moment in time, he would tell you that he's fine.

And he'd be lying.

It hasn't been a couple of easy months for him.

Life hasn't been kind to him. He hasn't been kind to himself.

One thing in his life has been the least kind of them all: petite, female-shaped, blonde hair and blue-gray eyes, rosebud mouth and a name that has haunted his waking hours and his sleeping wanderings since he has met her on a fateful night back in 2013. It's Claire, obviously.

She's never been kind to him, even though she doesn't know it, because her meanness is not intentional. She probably doesn't even know what she does to him, on a regular basis, as everything that happens, happens inside of Harry's mind and inside of his body and his organs.

But in the past few months it has gotten unbearable for him.

And there has been a triggering event for all of this. That Godforsaken trip to Dunkerque.

Truth be told, about Harry, it's felt like a switch has been turned on inside of his mind, ever since One Direction ended. A word, a feeling, that had been lost on him for five full years of his life: the taste of freedom. Of knowing he can do what he wants to do, hang out with the people he wants to hang out with, choose the work projects he wants to be a part of. He no longer has to mold his personal preferences to those of four (and then three) other people and a very oppressive management. He no longer has a strict schedule that allows him five minutes a day of true freedom where he doesn't have to think of his next move as he's still wrapping up the previous one.

And, he has found out, the taste of true anonymity. It's not like the world has forgotten who he is: everyone knows him, everyone knows who he is and what he represents and everyone wants a taste of it. Of him. No, what's changed is how he approaches the whole thing: turns out, if one doesn't want to be found or seen, he can achieve those things. He can lead a quiet life, he can be away from the scrutiny and the constant flashes of cameras, he can regulate those and send them away if he doesn't want to be seen. He can have privacy. A concept that has eluded him quite often, if not always, in the previous five years. He hadn't known, back in the X-Factor days, what signing himself up with a band would imply and include. He has found that he doesn't like it. And now that the band is over and done for (Thank God!) he wants that control back.

There's a difference to how he does things now. If he knows he has work commitments, he knows the game, and he can play it well. But if he doesn't have anything related to work to do, then he wants his freedom and his privacy. He wants to be able to live his life normally. He has managed to do so, 90% of the year.

And he thought he could include Claire in that portion of his life. That their relationship would change - how, he was not sure - since his commitment to the band has changed as well.

And their relationship has changed in the past year. But not like he has wanted it to.

Truth be told, again, he has made the mistake of thinking that their relationship, much like his life after the band, would evolve naturally into something more. Something different.

It hasn't.

And a realization has hit him. A devastating one.

For their relationship to change into what he wants, deep down inside of his heart, in the very marrow of his bones, Harry has to work for it. Because the change isn't going to come naturally, like he wants it to come.