The Day One Direction Died

The Lost Chapter - Zayn

The Lost Chapter

Zayn

I looked around me, to my friends and my life and contemplated reality. I wondered about the concept of reality, what was real, what was not. The dream I had of Eleanor and I, the things we did, the love we had. I thought of how that was real, how everything was so real. How did I know that the life I was currently living, that the thoughts going through my head were the truth? That this was reality? How did I not know that this was a dream, as I hadn’t known my dream had been a dream? My life, everything surrounding me, seemed so real, but what divided reality from falsehood? How did we know what was truth and what was a lie? My life that I know of now could be false. We believe what our eyes, our senses tell us is true, but how can we rely on that when we have senses in our dreams? Our thoughts, our senses, are just impulses from our minds, if that was manipulated, if that were changed in some way, how would we know? What separates dream from reality and the truth from a lie?

I finally decided that there was no way of telling a lie from a truth, and that all we know is from our own perspective. We can never know for sure what is the truth, because there is no absolute truth, only what we believe to be true. We believe what we learn, and what others tell us, and what we sense. But there is no truth, no real meaning of the word. All we know is belief, belief that what we know is real, just like the reality of a God, or that the world is flat, or that there are stars in our galaxy or that we ourselves are real. We believe that these things are true; because that is the only thing we can believe. If we go around thinking everything is a lie and that everything is false, we are not truly living in this reality that we perceive.

We have to believe that what we see, what we feel, what we know is true, and live in it. If we spend our whole lives looking to the answers of life, what is the meaning of living at all? We are given awareness, a sense of personal awareness that is unique in humanity. Animals, primal beings do not know what is best for them; they live on instinct, while we sit here and contemplate why we are here. That makes us human. But the fact is that we are here, we are alive, we are aware, so having our beliefs is the only thing we can really hold on to. I supposed it was a question of faith. Faith in what we believed to be real, and if we continued to contemplate that, then we would lose the tribal instinct of love and joy and sadness and death. We are contemplative people, but we must hold on to the reality that we know, or else we lose our reason for existence.

I had to believe that the world I was living in was real because I perceived it to be true. I couldn’t sit here and judge my own reality, I had to, well, live in the moment. I believed that my dream was real, but it wasn’t. That doesn’t make my experience in that dream to be any less true, or my experience here to be any less real.

I remember waking up that day, so sure that I had died and that Eleanor had died next to me, and so sure in my belief of what was true that I didn’t realize that there was a possibility that my friends could still be alive. When I realized the fact that everything was a dream, that it was just neurons firing in my brain that had come up with the entire plot, I nearly broke down and started crying. Then I remember my next immediate thought. If it was a dream, what about Eleanor? It would mean that the good things that had happened never happened, even though the bad things were taken away as well. I never had a relationship with Eleanor; I never fell in love again. I never kissed her, her cuts never healed, even though I never went to their funeral or died in a fire.

I remember watching Niall, his drunken sleepiness next to me as I came to terms with my new reality. Even after staring at him creepily, thinking of how everything in this world happens and life and love and everything, I still stared at Eleanor the next time I saw her, at the docks when we landed back in the UK. She smiled and hugged Louis, and she just stared back at me for a moment before glancing away. She didn’t seem shy or embarrassed or repulsed, only meeting my gaze with the same intensity of which I met hers. I wondered what she was thinking as Louis and Niall animatedly talked about the cruise and the drinks and all the things we had done, even though everyone said that I was depressing toward the end, which I had been, glad, so very grateful to have my friends back, but upset over the loss of someone I loved so immensely, even though it never actually happened and I never actually lost anyone.