Violent Delights | H.S.

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Some things in life are truly impossible to understand.

Here's one of them. (Bear with me.)

One day, you'll wake up, and it'll start like any other day. You'll wake up – probably after hitting snooze on your alarm once or twice – and reluctantly get out of bed, then brush your teeth, get breakfast (if you remember to), and finally head out the door to go off and do whatever important or unimportant thing you've decided on doing. The same mundane, simple tasks you do every morning to start off a mundane, simple day – nothing particularly special is planned, but nothing shitty either; everything's just fine.

Maybe you're the type of person who prefers that. Routine, repetition, comfortability. Maybe you like waking up on a Monday morning and already knowing what you'll be doing on every following day of that same week. Or maybe you really, really resent that reality, or even the fact that you had to wake up at all. I think most people fall pretty reasonably in the middle of this spectrum. But, either way, it doesn't actually matter – your day is gonna be your day no matter how you feel about it.

Anyway, back to your day. A boring, regular day with no expectations of excitement, and certainly not for anything entirely Earth-shattering.

Except, for once, this day is in fact exceedingly different, and different in a way you certainly hadn't anticipated. (Surprise!)

This day is the day you'll cross paths with your someone. And I mean, your actual someone – like, the person you're meant to be with for the rest of your life. Not the guy you meet at the bowling alley when you're 15 who cheats on you with a Cinnabon employee, like, your soul-mate. You'll bump into them on the street, or maybe stand next to them in line, or get barked at by their dog, or go to the same AA meeting (Hey, I don't know your issues.) You'll lock eyes and realize immediately that it's something, and, naturally, get to talking and falling in love.

By some miracle of God, or the universe, or fate, (or whatever it is that you believe in), you've done it – you've satisfied the most innate, intrinsic desire of the human condition; to find and experience genuine love. It's the one thing that everybody on this fucked-up planet strives for, and you've achieved it. You're finally able to comprehend what it means to not just be acquainted with the other half of your soul, but to be intertwined with it in every way - and with that, you find the answer to one of the universe's many mysteries in a single person, and it feels limitless, like everything in the best way.

Bliss. Essentially, bliss.

I'd always thought that was pretty much how it went.

But the truth hurts. When stripped from all the romanticized charm and fantasy of an innocent imagination, love is far different than my (and perhaps your) starry-eyed projections. The real truth is that love is impossible in every way – truly, every way.

Look, to even be given the chance, the mere shot at it, is beyond all sensibilities –

What if you would have woken up five minutes too late, or early, or took a different route to walk on, or chosen a different coffee shop? Your chance at love would have collapsed on itself and imploded into a profoundly sad bound of nothingness, a black hole of what so nearly could have been but will never have a chance to exist again. And all that nice shit from before? You wouldn't even fathom it, or begin to. All because you accidentally colored outside the lines of an impossible, improbable, nonsensical picture that you didn't even know you were coloring in the first place.

It's such a mind fuck.

And yet, even if you do miraculously manage to somehow do the precisely right set of random things in the precisely right random order, and the universe so allows every little thing to fall perfectly in place, people still suck and viscerally so. Emotions, circumstance, trauma, timing, and literally every part of life only serve to mock and test the fragile state that love exists in. Maybe it exists in the sliver between heaven and hell, or the blink between night and day, or some poetic shit like that.

I uncovered these troubling facts of life at 17, when the warm, comforting blanket of teenage naiveté was snatched from me by Harry Styles in a 4th-period theatre class. More specifically, because we were paired up for a Romeo and Juliet project, and for some fucked up but simultaneously divine reason, we met, and a series of (apparently) notable events followed.

I had never been so sure that my small, insignificant life was in those hands of his, and whatever he did with me was his choosing – and with this, I was completely satisfied. I had never been so sure that a person was my everything. Yet, in the same breath, I still wondered about the life I might've had if I'd woken up 5 minutes too late.

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