This Thing Upon Me [Order The eBook] [Harry Styles]

Chapter 2

Published March 29, 2020

(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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"Don't know where you're laying...just know it's not with me. Don't know what I'd tell you if I passed you on the streets. I don't want your sympathy, but you don't know what you do to me..."

"Don't know how you taste when...there's smoke in your perfume..."

Harry Styles | Anna

February 14, 2016

Smoke trapped in his cologne...it had been there tonight like always, and the things it had unearthed in me were seismic, to say the least. It housed every memory I ever nurtured of him, and it had been all I could do to refrain from breaking the moment I sensed it.

My scent was mingled in their too, or so I had deluded myself into believing. He had become so much a part of me I could hardly tell where he ended and I began. It pervaded all I knew of us and was the thing I favored most. In those days, we had been interlocked on a sacrosanct level—one mind, one goal, one unit. Sometimes down to the cellular—he and I spending hours in bed, our bodies sticky with the heat formed in our refusal to part.

Back then, I genuinely knew what it meant to call someone my other half and be inept without them. For me, he was that which made my world bearable, and as it stood, there still wasn't a more rational way of describing him. Trust that I had wracked my brain to find one.

Despite "other halves" being boasted about in books and movies, in reality, it was a rare phenomenon. And it had nothing to do with being soulmates. That's all bullshit. In my search for relatable stories after I'd gone off the deep end, I found that no one ever meant "other half" in the way that I meant it. Many claimed it in the early stages of mediocre marriages and fated relationships, but few actually knew what it entailed to rely on another human to make up the rest of you.

How was I so sure they didn't know? Because they spoke of it as though it were charming or dignified. It was neither. For me it was vicious. Weak-willed, dependent—demoralizing. Only exacerbated by the fact that I could never own up to it before. Not to him, and least of all myself. For your eyes only.

How is it that I wanted to confide in him things that I didn't even want myself to hear? How is it that I longed to be around him, when I didn't even want to be around myself most days? This was an illness and ought to be treated as such. He had taken control right away, and in all the years I remained under his influence, I had no idea the damage it would inflict when he finally decided to walk away. 

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Earlier tonight after the gala, as I stood in the empty iHop parking lot watching HIS car pull away, something had drawn me forward, making me stumble after him. For a while it exhorted me to follow his taillights, weaving throughout traffic in abandonment of my good sense. But I remained where I was, feet planted.

Those taillights were long gone. Already lost to traffic—endless LA traffic, which even at this hour proved nothing short of pandemonic. Those lights were lost among hundreds, in a kaleidoscope of similar town cars all headed in the same direction—away from me. I faltered for a while, and now all that blared in my mind was Lykke Li's, "I Follow Rivers" like it had when I was seventeen.