Fading.

If there was one thing that I was getting pretty good at was to adapt.

After having said that I had moved on and that I wanted Harry to move on too, I instantly wished that I could vanish from the surface of the earth. The air was so still and I literally could hear every particle bumping within each other as Harry chose to drive in silence – he had stopped humming and his lips were set into a firm line. I didn’t blame him. If I were put in his shoes, I would have done the same. He was doing what everyone would do if they had to be him right now.

Watching him, I knew I had once again sliced him open and poured a truckload of salt in his wounds.

There was a world of chances for me – I could have told him that I hadn’t moved on, that at night I was still yearning for his warmth to be next to me, that I was secretly hoping he would come to my apartment and do whatever he used to do when he was there, that I was still hopelessly in love with him – and we could have gone past this back and forth shit.

Harry was wearing his heart on his sleeves and I didn’t. I let my ego win and if I thought I sort of hated myself before, I officially hated myself now.

When he pulled onto the main road that led us to my apartment, I sucked in a deep breath. This might be my last chance of sitting in his car, being able to have a conversation with him because after I climbed out of this car tonight, I knew I probably wouldn’t be able to talk to him let alone meet him again.

“Are you alright?” I asked quietly as he did a three point turn and screeched down the bumpy drive.

It was most likely the stupidest question I could ever come up with but I didn’t want my last memory of me with Harry was of him giving me the silent treatment though I very much deserved it.

Funny how he could be so brave as to lay it all in the open when he knew I would only disappoint him and how I was so scared to utter my thoughts when I knew he would not fail me.

“If for some reason we’re not closer when I was away, if something has gotten between us, please, I’m begging you..don’t give up on me. Stay, stay with me. Work it out with me. Just don’t leave me, please.”

I had not only failed him but I failed myself too. I didn’t stay with him. I didn’t try to make it work. I simply gave up. When Harry declared that he was breaking up with me, that he was letting me go, I took that as a chance to run away.

“I’m fine,” he looked over at me and I could see the debate in his eyes. Looking back to the road, he finally said, “It hurts.. Yes. But I’m fine – I will be. It’s my faults anyway.” His tone was soft, but it was also firm as he added the last part.

He was blaming himself for this because that’s who Harry Styles was – he took the blame and carried it around. Like when he couldn’t reach the high notes when he had to sing for a live TV show because of his sore throat, he beat himself up because he assumed he had put everyone down though no one had ever thought of it that way.

But this time around, it wasn’t just his faults – I had my share in it too. I had made the decisions to stay away from him; I had pushed him away when he had pretty much said what I wanted to hear. I could have caved in but I didn’t.

“What’s her name?” I asked, biting my inner cheeks.

He hesitated for a moment then after exactly seven seconds of silence, he answered me, “Olivia.”

I nodded once and swallowed the growing lump in my throat, “That’s.. That’s a beautiful name.”

“Yeah.. It is.” His tone was clipped and I was aware of the fact that he didn’t want to talk about it.

I knew I would get nothing from him if I pressed him about it. I’d also had my quota for the day on difficult conversations, so I let him drop it.

When we finally reached my apartment, he looked over to me with wistful eyes and I remembered, once again, how things had changed.

Being the gentleman he was, Harry wanted to walk me to my door, but I made him stay in the car. That was hard enough; having him at my door would be near impossible temptation. Because a small part of me wanted to beg him to stay, to come inside and sweep me into my room, and make me forget everything that was between us. But the majority of me knew that was only a patch, and wouldn’t fix anything. It would only make it harder to separate, if that was what we were going to do.

Steeling myself as we sat in his car in the driveway, I looked squarely at him and stated as professionally as I could, “I hope you work things out with Olivia.”

He nodded, and his sad eyes glassed over. That nearly broke my resolve. His next sentence, kind of did. “May I kiss you goodnight?”

This time, I nodded. I couldn’t say no to that when I wanted it too – I wanted to kiss him goodbye, I wanted to feel his lips against mine for the last time knowing that next time, it wouldn’t be mine anymore.

That kiss, in the silence of his car, with the light from his dashboard splashed across our skin will remain with me for the rest of my time on this earth. At the moment, it shattered my heart, but upon later reflection, it healed it as well.

This was our closure.

As the tender warmth of his lips pulled away from me in that car, I could have sworn a piece of me was pulled away as well. I’ve never been one to feel dependent on someone else for my own happiness, but gazing at his green eyes, I knew that I would never be complete in this life without him.

I whispered goodbye and slung my bag onto my shoulder. He watched me the entire way, his hands gripping the steering wheel, like he was willing himself to stay in the car. It wasn’t until I had my door closed behind me and I heard the electric hum of his car pulling away, that I realized that he never said goodbye to me.

That was also when I realized that I had to adapt. I asked myself over and over what would someone do if they were in this situation. What would most people do in this situation? Of course, the answer was obviously to do the right thing but when you were thrown into this sort of situation, you couldn’t possibly differentiate what’s wrong and what’s right anymore. It all jumbled up.

It was between what you wanted and what you needed to do, instead.

And this time, I chose what I needed to do despite what I really wanted which was to have Harry Styles back.

This shouldn’t be hard. Why was this so hard?


Harry was good with kids – in fact, he was better with kids than I was.

A loud whisper came from behind us, “No, Mama, I know it’s him!” and I turned to see a little girl about the age of seven studying Harry.

He smiled at her and her face lit up. She left her mother’s side and her mother reached out to grab her arm but missed. “I’m sorry, she’s convinced you’re Harry Styles.”

Harry only smiled and shrugged, and then he squatted down to her level. “Hello,” he said in a voice I swear could melt butter.

“You’re Harry Styles, aren’t you?”

He glanced up at the mother and back down at the girl and put his finger over his mouth. “Yes, I am, but can you keep it as our secret?”

Her little face lit up, and she grinned from ear to ear. The mother appeared stunned. Harry reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out a card. “Here, this has my contact number and email address on it. Do you have a pen on you, Sky?”

I was as mesmerized as the little girl. It took me a second to register what he asked. I grabbed my handbag, pulled out a pen and handed it to him. He signed it and asked her name.

“Sara Stone,” she replied.

He pulled out another card and wrote her name on it. “Now, Sara, get your mum to call Paul. He will be expecting a call from a Sara Stone. I am going to be stopping here on my tour and this will get you a backstage pass and front row seats.”

The little girl began to squeal and Harry put his finger over his lips again. She nodded vigorously and covered her mouth.

“Just keep my secret about being here, all right?”

She nodded and he kissed her forehead before standing up. The mother’s eyes glistened with tears. I realized tears were burning the back of my eyes too.

The mother smiled through her tears. “Thank you, I don’t, I mean I can’t…” she took a deep breath and smiled. “Thank you. She loves you. You boys are all over her bedroom walls. This year has a been a tough year for us; she has just lost her father and things have been tough.” She wiped the tears away and shook her head, smiling. “Thank you so much.”

The little girl ran over to her mother and handed her the card. She turned back to Harry and put her little finger over her mouth and grinned. He bowed and blew her a kiss. Her small little hand reached out, grabbed the invisible kiss and placed it on her lips. My heart melted as I watched them walk away, the little girl gazing back and smiling at him until they were out of sight.

I wiped the tears off my face. “Yeah, that one got me too.”

He walked over to me, wiped a tear off my cheek and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “I didn’t mean to make you cry. I just have a soft spot my younger fans.”

“No, I loved getting to see you with her. It was precious. I bet it was the highlight of her life.”

Harry grinned. “I doubt that.”

I raised my eyebrows and countered, “Well, you’re wrong. When she is thirty years old, she will be telling about the night in a grocery store where she met Harry Styles.”

Harry smiled wickedly, “If I give you back stage passes and blow you a kiss, will it be the highlight of your life?”

I managed to keep from getting hypnotized by his incredible eyes focused on me intently. “No, only works on fans.”

He frowned and placed his hand over his heart, “Ouch.”


I continued with my life like nothing had happened.

Like I hadn’t just thrown away a big part of myself because of my selfishness. I feigned happiness in front of everyone – another thing that I was becoming good at – even in front of Allison and Daisy though they would once or twice question me if I really were okay. It wasn’t hard because everyone else however didn’t seem to notice anything.

They didn’t see the hole in my heart, but I felt it.

Around 11 pm, I stumbled into my apartment and made a beeline to the living room. There was one thing that I had been meaning to do since I got off from work and I knew I had to do it now before I started thinking twice about it. It was something that I should have done a while ago.

I wanted to clear out all of the letters that had been sitting on the coffee table for almost two months now.

Sitting cross-legged on the floor, I took one letter after another without reading it thoroughly. I didn’t do what Harry usually did; I didn’t separate the important and unimportant letters. I put them aside so I could toss them away later. I just couldn’t stand seeing them on the small table, untouched and I couldn’t stand walking into the living room, seeing images of Harry opening each one of them.

Out of every memory of Harry that I had in this apartment, this one was the one that I really needed to let go.

I used to think I could not go a day without his smile. Without telling him things and hearing his voice back.

The day had arrived where I had to get rid of things that reminded me of Harry. It was so damn hard but the next was harder. I knew with a sinking feeling that it was going to get worse and I wasn’t going to be okay for a very long time because losing someone wasn’t an occasion or an event. It didn’t happen just once. It happened over and over again.

I lost Harry every time I picked up his favourite mug; whenever that one song played on the radio, or when I discovered his old t-shirt at the bottom of my laundry pile. I lost him every time I thought of kissing him, holding him or wanting him. I went to bed at night and lost him, when I wished I could tell him about my day. And in the morning when I woke and reached for the vacant space across the sheets, I began to lose him all over again.

You don’t love someone for a long time and then turn it off overnight.

It took time but I knew eventually I would heal. Life would go on for me, for Harry and for everyone around us.

*

They said that in a crisis, time stuttered to a slow halt. They said each minute seemed to stretch into an hour as everything, every breath in your body and every clench of your heart, was magnified to impossible magnitude. They said that you couldn’t snap out of it, couldn’t unfreeze the world, but could only stay trapped in the clear glass prison of your nightmare.

But when I went through the guest list of the upcoming fashion show that we were going to organize in London, and when my eyes immediately zoned down to Harry’s name, every single nerve in my body snapped to attention like I had been electrified from the tips of my toes all the way up to my widening eyes.

I eyed the list twice to make sure that my eyes hadn’t made a trick or lied to me – it hadn’t.

“Are you okay?” Allison asked as she set down a cup of coffee on my desk. Her eyebrow was arched as she watched me. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

I swallowed the nervous knot in my throat and shook my head, “I’m good. Thanks for the coffee.”

She nodded once and continued, “Harry’s coming to the show.”

“Yeah, I guess he is.”

She crossed her arms in front of her chest and tilted her head to the side, “and you’re going to be there..”

“Yes, you’re right.” I answered, not understanding where she was heading to with this conversation. Of course Harry was going to be there, he had never missed a single fashion show when he was on a break from the tour for the last three years and of course I was going to be there because that was my job, I had to be there.

Allison’s brows puckered up in confusion, “I heard he’ll be there with.. erm.. the new girl.”

I waited for the tears to come but it didn’t. However I immediately looked up from the piece of paper and my breath was knocked out of me; I inhaled a deep breath and feigned a happy face. It was bound to happen wasn’t it? Harry was bound to go out with another girl because he wasn’t tied up to me anymore. Besides, I had told him to move on and work things out with Olivia so I shouldn’t be surprised.

“That’s great. I’m sure the media would love it.” I smiled as I put down the guest list and took the cup of coffee. As I took a sip of it, Allison sat on one of the chairs in front of me; her eyes hadn’t left mine while she continued watching me like a hawk like she was waiting for me to burst into tears.

I was stronger than that – I reminded myself.

Allison’s next question somehow made me question myself, “You’re okay with it? Seeing him with another girl?”

Was I okay with it? Would I be okay to see another girl took over my spot, attached to his side from now on as they walked together, sat together, and even left home together?

I shrugged, “I wouldn’t know, Al.”

Notes