Z.A.Y.N.

TRACK 14

Most of the time, waking up after getting less than half the recommended hours of sleep does make for a happy Liam; he'll be grumpy for hours and need to chug coffee until it wears off (or honey tea if the reason he's up early is for a performance), but waking up to his blaring alarm that morning was as terrible as he expected it to be. With a tattoo covered body spread all over him, how could it be?

Still, Liam makes them both coffee to take on the drive to the park, which the singer does his best to focus on and not get distracted by the way Zain looks in the joggers and red t-shirt of Liam's he borrowed after his shower the night before.

"The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,
as if orchards were dying high in space.
Each leaf falls as if it were motioning 'no'.
And tonight the heavy earth is falling
away from all other stars in the loneliness.
We're all falling. This hand here is falling.
And look at the other one. It's in them all.
And yet there is Someone, whose hands
infinitely calm, holding up all this falling. "

Liam finds himself entranced by Zain's voice, and the way it makes the words seem less confusing, more profound, like he's sure they're meant to be interpreted, he's just too daft to be able to do himself. Even if Zain knew that, the fact that he would still choose to recite the poem to Liam made the younger male see that his ability to appreciate wasn't being discounted.

"Rilke," Zain states as they're walking out to the football pitch that he's deemed worthy for their voluntary sulking. "It's called 'Autumn'."

"It was nice."

"You understood it?"

Scratching his head, Liam looks around at the empty park to make sure they're alone, as well as to ignore Zain's judgemental gaze when he says, "Yeah, of course I did."

"You're a terrible liar." Throwing himself onto the ground, Zain looks up at Liam with expectancy for him to do the same. "He's my favorite poet, German." After Liam joins him on the grass, Zain continues. "He invented the object poem."

"What's that?"

"It's a poem that describes the finiteness and true reality that a physical object lives."

Because he can't grasp what that means for longer than a second, Liam asks what else the famed poet's written.

" My Holy Book," Zain sighs dreamily. "In 1929, he published this book, 'Letters to a Young Poet', that's literally just him giving advice to someone who thinks they want to be a poet." He pauses briefly. "'Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you to write; find out whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write'."

Liam brings his hands up from his sides to rest on his stomach, "Would you?"

"Yeah," Zain answers simply. "Yeah, I think I would."

They lay next to each other, left arm pressed up against right, in silence. The early morning sun's lighting up the sky, and just like Zain had hoped for, Liam starts to feel melancholy. It could be that he's looking to feel that way, so that's why it's so easy to find, but Zain's taught him how to seethings in the life around him, not just look at it. Laying in the middle of the football pitch, distant chirping their only soundtrack to the moment, makes Liam realize how big the world is, and subsequently, how fearful he should be because of it. On the flip side, there's something about the isolation of the experience that's starting to evolve into the beauty that Zain had pointed out the night before. He had been kidding about crying when he'd said it, but he could see how, in a similar way to when people cried when they were happy, he could eventually cry from the beauty of sadness. Never would that concept have been one Liam could've thought up on his own before Zain; there was just no way.