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ialwaysknewyouwerepunk · 3 years

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only angel - a close reading

hey guys, gals and nonbinary pals, here is a close reading i did of ‘only angel’ by our babe, harry styles. i want to make it VERY CLEAR that this is just my opinion and my reading, talking from my own experiences and how i’ve learned to interpret art. i’m an eng lit major so i actually am not talking out of my ass on this subject, for once. i am also not cis or straight, if that makes a difference in your reading of this post. yes, this post is about harry being genderqueer. if you are absolutely not open to this possibility, then you can just ignore this post and scroll by. (unhelpful anons will be ignored, but i’m happy to go into dialogue if some things aren’t fully clear. this masterpost can help with a lot of questions too)

i’ll be using he/him pronouns to refer to Harry. He’s been called both he/him and she/her by close friends and family members, and seems to accept both. for the sake of keeping things clear in this post, he/him is what i’ll go with.

thanks to my gc friends for the brainstorm session and helpful insights, you’re all so intelligent ily (and sorry ari for bringing harry’s love for bukowski’s poetry to your attention)

if anyone is interested, i also did a (less heavy) analysis of meet me in the hallway!

TW/ alcohol, sex, self-harm

NOW LET’S GET INTO IT

(intro, spoken, excerpt from Barfly) I saw this angel, I really saw an angel

Barfly, film with screenplay by Charles Bukowski, introduces the atmosphere of the song. The film deals with alcoholism, adultery, violence. The story is partly autobiographical, with Bukowski representing himself as his alter ego. One of the main characters, an adulteress, at one point proclaims she can see angels.

Angels are usually a positive force in a story, despite being imaginary or appearing in dreams. In Bukowski’s work, ‘angel’ is often used as a derogatory term:

dogs and angels are not

very far apart

Bukowski is known as a misogynistic ass - pardon my french - since he loved to depict women as inferior beings he could ‘conquer’ during sex, etc. He was a self-proclaimed “dirty old man”, owning up to his terrible characteristics (that often got the better of him) and this ownership of that part of him that he hates is something to keep in mind. (Bukowski struggled with depression and alcoholism after an abusive childhood but this does not excuse any abuse on his part.)

My own interpretation of his work, since I do appreciate his poetry because I like free verse, down-to-earth use of words and themes, and I have a terrible soft spot for tortured artists (we all need our flaws, right?), is that he was intelligent but incredibly self-destructive, so with every smart and earnest word that he uttered he felt like muttering two that took all of it back and slapped you in the face while he was at it. “Can't they see through my skin, can't they see that I am nothing?” Self-hate, self-destruction. (sign me up bc i’m a sucker and a fool)

Open up your eyes, shut your mouth and see

Who is this “you”?

the general public (gp)/media. Open your fucking eyes and stop spewing what you think you know, because if you actually look, the answers are all there.

“I” talking to himself, who I will identify as Harry from now on

That I'm still the only one who's been in love with me

“I”, H, is the only one who knows who he is. Also an allusion to narcissism: “in love” is usually said to/about someone else, not oneself. “With me” instead of “with myself”; natural phrasing would usually be different. Invested in himself, in his self. (Would he maybe say “I love myself” if he were more familiar with what that self entails?)

“Who’s been in love with me”: continuous tense implies the continuity of these emotions: any other lovers/forms of attention have been fleeting, temporary (or so he thinks)

I'm just happy getting you stuck in between my teeth and there's nothing I can do about it

gp’s opinion of Harry Styles™️: compulsive womaniser, Aggressive Man in patriarchal heteronormative society

him biting into his life, his self, everything that makes him him. He can’t help it, he can’t shut (parts of) himself down.

Broke a finger knocking on your bedroom door, I got splinters in my knuckles crawling ‘cross the floor

again, CisHet Harry, Aggressive Man

basically going mad trying to knock his own walls down. It fucking hurts to try to figure out what’s going on inside of him; trying to fight it

Couldn't take you home to mother in a skirt that short, but I think that's what I like about it

couldn’t take any of his many ‘conquests’ home bc it’s too superficial, ‘dirty’

this self is not something he shows at home, because it’s about sex and physicality, so not something he’d share with his mom, but it is something he wants to own and embrace (～Bukowski)

She's an angel, Only angel, She’s an angel, My only angel

Het Harry and his latest fling, possessive (～Bukowski)

Harry and the ‘angel’, the ‘she’ who lives inside of him

(verse 2)

I must admit I thought I'd like to make you mine

Very ambiguous, insecure phrasing. Where is the macho, Aggressive Man (1)?

→ H and his internal struggles (2)

As I went about my business through the warning signs

Het Harry, Aggressive Man pushing through. Relationship/fling with red flags, but lust takes over

making his ‘angel’, his ‘she’, a part of him, embodying her. The struggles that come with that: possible loss of sight of self. At what cost does ‘she’ come out (self-destructive lifestyle)? How deep is ‘she’ buried? (How many drinks does he need?)

End up meeting in the hallway every single time

‘Meet Me In the Hallway’: relationship struggles, loss of self, “I gotta get better”

The hallway is neutral ground: not the bedroom, not the kitchen (themes in H’s other lyrics). No one is dominant here: no Aggressive Man, no ‘angel’. Just Harry, trying to figure it all out. He keeps ending up in the hallway because neither the Man nor the ‘angel’ embody him completely, so he has to start afresh with his self-discovery.

And there's nothing we can do about it

SWITCH. First time “we” is used.

For H, there is no ‘I’, it’s always ‘we’. He can’t ‘choose a side’ or ‘figure out’ which of his pronouns he is. He is all of the above.

Told it to her brother and she told it to me

(What the hell does this mean? Literally no clue. What are these pronouns doing? The ‘angel’, “she”, isn’t “you”, which would’ve made interpretation (1) make sense. Now, any woman H would be mentioning in verse 1 (when saying “you”) is not “she” in this verse, otherwise “you” would still be used. Either it’s sloppy writing, or it means something else. You tell me, for real. What’s this “brother” doing here? (I think ‘brother’ could easily be replaced by ‘lover’ and then it would at least make sense for the womaniser interpretation.)

That she's gonna be an angel,

She’s going to be nothing but imaginary. Another interpretation is that “she” is threatening to go so far and actually self-destruct. Implications of s******.

just you wait and see

General “you”, the listener/etc. Taunting message: ‘she’ needs to prove something.

When it turns out she's a devil in between the sheets

And there's nothing she can do about it

Antithesis of ‘angel’ and ‘devil’. Both beings not present in the real world.

→ Even “she” can’t run away from dualities.

Sex, acceptance of his self as a sexual being.

Wanna die, wanna die, wanna die tonight (3x)

Implied ‘I’, but left out

→ metre reasons

→ omission of pronouns as a conscious choice

Heavy sentiment.

self-destructive - “just you wait and see” - hints at lifestyle that could ruin you, mentally and physically (～Bukowski)

self-harm

SOUND: musically, it sounds similar to ‘Kiwi’, ‘Woman’ and ‘She’; the themes also overlap: the woman as seductive, sexy, devious, imaginary

SYNTHESIS

Harry as a writer finding himself in Bukowski’s writing: womaniser image that has always been projected onto him from a very young age. Harry does not identify with this persona, but plays with it in his mind after years of having to play pretend, and with the knowledge that the gp sees him that way. He deliberately uses imagery that could lead to his songs being easily interpreted in multiple ways. You can hear this song and think it’s about Harry the CisHet Womaniser, who has casual sex all the time, is dominant and aggressive. (After, back tf off)

Or you can think it’s about Harry showing his internal struggle, his fight with himself, his gender, trying to figure out who he really is. Why can’t he identify with this image of Man that’s been projected onto him all these years, an image so accepted in the patriarchal heteronormative society he was raised in? And why is this “she” so unreachable? Why is she only an imaginary being, like an angel or a devil? Why are the doors closed?

Self-destruction as a theme in this song, with implications of self-harm (breaking his finger, splinters in his knuckles, wanting to die), underlines the heaviness of the lyrics, the difficulty of his struggle. References to Bukowski then hint at alcohol use, which brings out these personas that reside in Harry’s imagination, in how he sees himself and how he knows others see him.

The references to Bukowski, in my opinion, reveal Harry’s struggle with his self-image. Part of him wants to be famous, to be a rockstar, to indulge in parts of that lifestyle. Does that make him a bad person? Has he sometimes lost sight of who he is because of that? (Harry finding recognition in Bukowski hurts my heart, bc to me it implies H’s self-hate, an inclination/attraction to self-destructive tendencies and his dismissiveness of his artistic abilities. not to be dramatic. brb crying)

The ‘she’ in Harry’s ‘we’, in Harry’s self, is seductive and reckless, and since the release of Fine Line we have been able to see an evolution in his experience of her. Character development, if you will. In ‘Only Angel’, she’s part of a fight, someone who only comes out at desperate times, as a reaction to his forced CisHet persona, or after some sort of substance abuse. In ‘She’ or ‘Fine Line’, her presence is less lethal.

My interpretation of the pronouns used in this song is exactly that: Harry is every single one of them, either a persona or actually him. Harry is genderqueer in some way or other.

read my other lyric analyses here

#harry #lyric analysis #only angel #harry styles #tw suicide #tw self harm #tw alcohol #hs1 #please respect this post #do not come harassing me in my inbox plsssssss #alright bye #and again sorry ari #but our harry references bukowski whether you like it or not #longpost #lp

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1dffexchange · 5 years

Photo

to fight (when you feel like flying)

To: Anna @twomoonstyles

From: Inm @in-madhouses

Summary: harry has never had a place to call home, not since one direction became a thing. zaemira has intentionally avoided home, fearing the monotony and a life not lived. their paths cross and like two lines that are meant to meet and fall apart every so often, they find a home in one another.

a story about binge drinking, tattoos, and how sometimes, building homes out of people can be the only thing that keeps you going. also known as a tribute to brasil!harry and the (not so) secret thigh tattoos.

Warnings: some offensive language, alcohol use heavily implied, hints of substance abuse (if you squint) and sexual references. there are also mentions of hendall, hadine and hamille although not explicitly named. the timing is also nowhere near accurate but let's call it artistic freedom.

rio de janeiro

may 2014

They break up on the eve of his departure. It’s the band’s first all-stadium tour and somehow, as quickly as they were a thing, they just weren’t by the time February rolled around.

They’d clung onto one another for dear life through the winter months and the physical hole she leaves behind is filled by the pictures of her everywhere. There are fall fashion shows, and there are music festivals, and there billboards, and there are gossip rags. As far as the eyes can reach, there she is, in one form or another.

Harry leaves for the tour with the boys and it’s exactly like he expected. He is grinning from ear to ear standing atop of the world night after night, the stars in his eyes left by the glow of the headlights is eclipsed only by ear-ringing screams they are accompanied by.

Each night is a swirling tide, even when he is not on stage.

But the mask cracks eventually.

The air stills.

They do seven cities in twelve days and he’s tired already. He’d inadvertently frowns at the wrong moment, or sigh, or have a faraway look in his eyes, barely anchored to the present. And they catch it. They always catch it. But the walls come back up as swiftly as they tumble down.

He’d smile. Smile, smile, smile. Smile until it hurts.

Smile until it’s believable.

(It never is.)

He spends too much time bouncing between staring holes into his phone and wanting to go at it with a hammer. There’s just something confusingly enthralling about the pictures and the videos of her that keep popping up. The precise red carpet movements, the long lithe legs, the perfect posture, the jawline for days.

Niall sends him memes round the clock to try to distract him from looking at new pap shots, and Liam tells him to just not to think about it.

“It’s called a quarter life crisis,” Zayn announces, elbowing Louis as they chuckle at his melodrama.

As though it’s the simplest problem ever to grace the earth, Louis offers a solution, “What you need is a good bender and a good cleanser.”

He’s got good mates, he thinks.

But then he’s in Rio and there are pictures of her at the Met Gala and next thing he knows, he’s downing caipirinhas by the glassful and there’s sun and sea and sightseeing and then more caipirinhas. He remembers exactly how everything unfolded, like watching a lifetime worth of dominoes collapse into a rather large portrait of a car crash.

It’s a slow night.

There’d been exactly one walk-in so far; a giggly nineteen year-old girl who wanted a Taylor Swift lyric tattooed on the middle of her lower back.

“It’s our song,” Swiftie says in regards to the tattoo, and whether the blonde haired, blue-eyed, cherry lipped teen was referring to her boyfriend or the title of the song, Zaemira will never know.

Since then, she’d been all by her lonesome for four whole hours and the tan skinned brunette is bored. She’d left her latest acquisition, a tattered first edition copy of Factotum back on the couch she was crashing on and with nothing to read or distract herself with, she is decidedly… bored. She’s antsy and she’s restless, and she’s super tempted to just flip the ‘open’ sign around to read ‘close’ and get drunk on cheap booze at the dodgy little bar down the road. That’s what soul-searching girls do when they end up working part-time at a seedy tattoo parlour in the tv shows anyway, why should she be the exception?

She’s so bored that her mind wanders and she's thinking that maybe it’s finally time to go home, not like call it a day home, but home home.

Zaemira had packed a bag and left the comforts of London right after graduating from her graphic design degree, hoping to find some kind of excitement out in the world before living out the predestined rest of her life in a cubicle churning out ad after ad for the nihilistic consumerist society she lived in before kicking it too early. But after a year on the road, honing the needle and ink in her hands and collecting first edition Bukowski’s, she is left wondering if there’s even a home for her to return to. The concept of it now so foreign to her even though her childhood had not been lacking in much.

The tinted shop door swings open right then with a squeak and a clatter of really impressively expensive sounding heels echoes through the tight little tattoo parlour space.

It’s all limbs and hair, flailing and tumbling forward face first into the floor.

She instinctively backs up away from the swirling mess.

“I’m fine! I’m—fine, just—I’m fine,” the bloke says, waving his arms about before rolling onto his back, splayed on the floor, taking up most of the floorspace, “You should—there should be a sign. Two. Yeah, two. One in English, and one in—what country are we in?”

Zaemira blinks at this hurricane on the tattoo parlor floor and studies him for a quick second.

“You’re in Brasil,” she starts saying once appropriately convinced that he’s not about to sick all over the shop floor, “And a sign for what exactly?”

He huffs, blowing several strands of thick brown hair out of his eyes in the process, “The stairs, love.”

She squats close by to examine this specimen interrupting her plans to close early and get hammered.

“There aren’t any stairs,” she says dryly, arching an eyebrow at his direction.

He sits up, coming dangerously close headbutting her and blinks at her.

“Then what’d I trip over?”

And he sounds so fucking plaintive, adorably dismayed and hilariously distressed, that Zaemira can’t help but bark out a laugh.

“Well, if I had to guess,” she starts saying, biting down on the laugh teetering on her lips because he sounds so honest to god confused and hilariously distressed sitting there on the tattoo parlour floor, “You tripped over the fucking distillery you inhaled at wherever you went to dinner.”

He squints up at her like he’s doubting the validity of this observation.

And then, “Are you English?”

She rolls her eyes at that, “What gave it away?”

He shuts one eye to peer at the girl before him, as though considering her seriously, “You’re far from home.”

“I could say the same about you,” Zaemira contests as she recognises his too young and too pretty and too distractingly familiar face, “You’re Harry Styles.”

He blinks and there are alarms blaring in her head as he smirks.

“You’re doing the introduction thing backwards there, sweetheart.”

“You don’t like people telling you who you are then?”

“Not very much, no,” he scrunches his nose, deep in thought for a second, before turning his attention back to her, “What’s your name?”

“Zaemira,” she replies, realising they’ve been on the floor way too long and her leg is close to falling asleep.

She holds her hand out to pull him up, and he accepts it all too enthusiastically.

“What kind of name is… Samira?”

She shrugs as she helps the six footer to his feet wobblily, eyes scanning the door he stumbled in through, wondering where his entourage is, “It’s Zaemira, actually. But you know what, you get to call me Mira, drunky-pants.”

“Well, I want a you tattoo,” he announces, voice a little bleary but determined. But there’s something dangerous there, too, something that reminds him of the sting of needle piercing skin.

She eyes him up and down as he wobbles and crosses her arms across her chest.

“I don’t think so.”

“No, no. You don’t—” Harry hiccoughs and takes several steps on the spot to balance himself, “—understand. I want your name— Zaemira— tattooed on me.”

He takes extra care to pronounce her name right the second time around that she is just inexplicably fucking endeared by the entire spectacle.

Zaemira blinks.

“What?”

He frowns, as though worried he’s not articulating well enough for her to understand him, “Your name— I want it tattooed on me.”

She stares.

And then she stares some more.

“It’s a beautiful name— I never—” Harry hiccoughs, frowning and stopping himself mid sentence, “I never want to forget you.”

She’s definitely not bored anymore, she thinks.

So she cocks an eyebrow at him in a wordless game of truth or dare and he’s reckless and he’s dramatic and he’s beaming at her so brightly that she’s blinded by it, and her brain goes hazy and her thoughts switch frequency with an abrupt high-pitched whine of static.

cape town

april 2015

Harry thought he was doing better, he really did. It’s been almost a year since Rio and he’s Harry fucking Styles. He’s in one of the most popular bands in the world, he has a PR perfect sense of humour, sharp fucking cheekbones, and the word Brasil tattooed on his thigh to remind him that even when life feels like it’s spinning off its axis you can always find a centre again.

But then she breaks up with him, craving a more definitive commitment that he can’t offer, and they’re on tour again when Zayn, out of nowhere, announces that he’s needs to leave for a little bit which everyone knows is code for he’s tired and done with it all.

And the world just... started to spin a little off its axis again.

So he makes plans to arrive in Cape Town earlier than he needs to and heads straight to where his life last made sense when things moved too fast for him to catch up.

“We have to stop meeting like this,” he drawls from the doorway, smug and half a bottle of duty free booze dangling precariously in his hands.

Her whole body stalls, eyes the only thing that whips up from the book she’s engrossed in. The smile that carves itself onto her lips hits him square in the chest.

She sets the book aside, breathless, “How d’you know I was here?”

“I keep tabs on you,” Harry shrugs, tone casual, with a small smile playing on his lips playfully.

He had long made a mental note to keep up on her current location whenever he could since she’s far from forthcoming about her travels. Seems only fair since his movements in contrast is so easily trackable. One quick internet search and she’d be able to know if he was in Holmes Chapel or recording in Los Angeles or out grabbing a bite in New York.

“Why, because no one else will tattoo country names on you when you’re drunk?” Zaemira teases, taking a step forward, as though challenging him to crack first.

“Precisely,” he nods in all seriousness.

They both start grinning for no reason whatsoever and the laughter that sits in their chest bubbles over soon enough.

After Rio, he had gone back to his life and she went back to hers. She moved from city to city, continually avoiding home, and he went from stage to stage, seeking solace in the certainty of instability. But still, the heartfelt conversations and indelible experience they shared in various states of sobriety in Brasil bonded them together. Somewhere along the night almost a year ago, they had reached a point at which they both understood implicitly that no matter what, one could call and the other would answer no matter where they were.

And so they did.

They shared the big news; Zaemira whenever she found a new old Bukowski book and Harry whenever he was thinking about a new tattoo. To the layman, it may sound like a shallow kind of friendship, completely lacking any kind of commitment, but it wasn't.

On the contrary, it was the healthiest and longest lasting form of a relationship that either one of them ever had. Despite geographical and emotional distance, they were allowed to grow in their own way and not have to live through minute everyday highs and lows and petty dramas.

It was as liberating as it was peaceful.

And he could tell that his sudden physical presence is throwing her off.

“Seriously, what are you doing here?” She asks, tone light but the slant of her jaw more rigid than he’s used to and her posture brittle.

“We’re on tour,” Harry shrugs nonchalantly as he walks in around the tattoo parlour.

The space is small and intimate and starkly lit. The walls are embellished with clean lines and immaculate designs and it’s just like the spot in Rio where they met a year ago. Her caramel brown eyes are tailing him around the room and he wonders how someone who works with men looking to cover up prison ink all day can look so soft.

“I know that,” she says, her tone more curious than it is wary, “But what are you doing here?”

“Can’t a guy just drop by to see his friend when he’s in her neck of the woods?”

She narrows her eyes at him.

“A guy can, but a guy never has,” her voice dripping with the implication that he’s never lacking in the means to find her.

Which isn’t untrue.

He sighs.

“I was in New Orleans for all of a day, Zaemira.”

Harry likes saying her name in entirety. She prefers Mira, but he likes the unshortened version. It’s beautiful, it’s the kind of name that commands the full use of the orifice that most people use to stuff full of food or as a tool to lick and suck.

She stares at him, surprise evident.

“How could you possibly—”

“I have you on Instagram,” he replies, crisply, before taking another swig of the bottle in his hands.

“No, you don’t.”

“Only because I can’t publicly follow you.”

“So you just check my account obsessively like some kind of creepy stalker?”

Harry shrugs.

“Think we crossed that line when I fell into a certain tattoo shop a year ago, don’t you?”

Zaemira huffs out a breathless sounding laugh that hits him right in the center of his chest.

He had thought their paths would cross when after their last tour ended. He thought he might go out to New Orleans and get into that gumbo life for a couple of days. Stroll along the French Quarter and check in for a drink at Bourbon Street. Bask in the jazz and have a look around in a voodoo shop.

But when he’s back in LA after the tour, he finds out that she’s in Japan when he calls.

“Oh yeah, I’m in Tokyo,” she said over the phone distractedly, like it’s no big deal.

He frowned at that, confused. She had a tendency of not staying in one place for too long, but it was abrupt, even by her standards.

“What are you doing in Tokyo?” Harry questioned, brows furrowing so hard he felt frown lines forming.

“A bit of this, a bit of that,” Zaemira said noncommittally, “I thought Japan might be good after finding the boy I shacked up with completely naked and asleep with his ex.”

He gaped at that casual over-the-phone confession non-confession, befuddled and aghast.

“Did you let him have it?”

“What d’you mean?”

“Did you rip his dick off? Sock her in the nose? I could get some people together and hit him in the balls for you if you want,” Harry offered, only half-joking.

“No, I just packed my stuff and left.”

“You didn’t wake them up to confront him about it?”

“Why would I?”

Her confusion confused him. Harry paused, opening and closing his mouth several times, thinking back to break ups and make ups he’s been through, talked through, and fought through.

“You didn’t want any closure?”

“Why would I want to give him a chance to hurt me more?” Zaemira retorted, quick and sharp as ever, “He’s either going to lie about it, apologise and do something like it again, or completely be like whatever about the whole thing.”

“You... didn’t... think he deserved to know that what he did was wrong?” He prods along, cautiously.

Even after months of phone calls and texts, her candor and point of view never fails to catch him off guard.

“It’s not about him though,” she said all matter-of-factly, “I mean, he wouldn’t give me any kind of honesty, respect, or consideration, so fuck that closure.”

Zaemira isn’t shy. That’s for sure.

And she isn’t coy.

She’s loud and she’s outspoken and she had no qualms telling him that she didn’t want to die where she was born having realised that she’d done nothing out of her comfort zone which is why she left and took to sleeping on couches. Harry remembers how much he enjoyed that about her. How it had been refreshing to meet someone who enjoyed the newness. Someone who actually took pleasure in what life had to offer instead of just going through the motions.

“Well, now that you’re here…” she says as she moves towards the door, flipping the sign over from ‘open’ to ‘closed’, “What d’you feel up for tonight then, pop star?”

Her voice anchors him to the present. And she’s grinning up at him like he’s a firefly and she’s a mason jar, and he feels the countdown to self-destruction rumble in the hollow space beneath his ribs like the roar of a sports car engine.

His heart skips a whole beat at that.

The sun is creeping up slowly and steadily on the horizon. She’s sitting fully clothed in a fancy bathtub in a fancy hotel, clothes soaked and doing a piss poor job of trying not to smile.

She gives him a look and he just laughs, sat on the edge of the bathtub, also soaked through.

“We need to come down,” she said earlier, shaking her head as though the movement would clear her head of all that they’d indulged in through the night.

The first rays of sunlight had started to dot the skyline and he grinned devilishly, taking her by the hand, promising he knows just the thing that would do the trick. Harry promising he knows ‘just the thing’ was how they ended up high as a kite to begin with but she had trusted him thus far so she decided to trust him a little bit more. Which in hindsight was where it all went wrong because that’s how they end up in his hotel room filling up the bathtub with water and foam shampoos and bath salts.

The windows are open, carrying their laughter and giggles to the streets below. But that’s not her main concern. Somehow, in an effort to make the bath as enjoyable as possible, Harry had turned on the shower head and initiated a spray war. The physical exertion and the laughter had sobered her a bit, but the tradeoff was that she now wanted a cigarette which was not possible since he all but dunked her into the tub to claim his victory.

She pulls the soggy packet from her denim jacket breast pocket, the gross brown liquid oozing from it indelicately.

“You’ve wet my cigarettes,” she says as she tries to look upset.

One glance at him though and she’s reduced to a puddle within the puddle she’s sitting in.

“You should really quit anyway.”

“Piss off,” she tosses the wet box at him.

It lands two feet off its target with an unceremonious splat and they laugh at her aim. They laugh and they laugh some more and talk about nothing and everything.

She talks about her mum. She never talks about her mum. But suddenly she’s talking about her mum and how she left and how it broke her father and it had hurt her to see him hurt the way he did. How he had let himself be hurt like that and still cling on to the hope of her mother coming back one day.

Harry is nodding and then they’re both just complaining about how unfair and shitty life is when he says it. Blurts it out, almost, like a secret that he can no longer contain.

“I want a tiger on my thigh.”

She’s so dazed that all she can do is look at him.

“D’you reckon you can do a tiger for me?” He repeats himself, almost as though in fear that she wouldn’t understand the urgency of his request.

She doesn’t question it, but she understands the symbolism instinctively.

“Sure,” she smiles, leaning her head back.

“Tomorrow morning?” He quirks his head, eyes glazing over as he tries to, in his solidly drunk state, try to remember if he has any other planned activity.

“That’s right now,” she laughs, lifting her heavy head to look at him, “And neither one of us are sober enough to walk a straight line, let alone hold a tattoo gun.”

“I trust you,” Harry says, voice dropping impossibly lower and she hears alarm bells start to ring in her head.

She’s makes a joke about him always being so eager to drop his pants around her and regrets it instantly because he’s smirking at her and looking at her the way he does and she almost forgets how to breathe.

“Maybe you just have that effect on me.”

“Careful,” she says dryly, “Or I might think you're trying to flirt with me, Styles.”

“Oh, you'd know if I was trying to flirt with you.”

“Maybe,” she concedes, before deciding that the best course of action is to slide further into the tub, “But would you?”

His smile that follows is breathtaking and the unabashed laughter that spills over is something else entirely. It’s warm and new, with some kind of never seen before sparkle in his eye. As though it’s an exclusive layer of whoever he is when he’s around her and her only. A smile that’s peeled back and raw and intimate.

Her chest blooms of something she can’t quite explain.

los angeles

jan 2016

“Look, I don’t mean to sound outrageously savage here but… you have a thing for collecting winter clings,” she says.

“What on earth is a winter cling?”

Zaemira pauses.

“It’s the Harry Styles version of a summer fling,” she states simply, “But you have them around in the winter because that’s when you get loneliest.”

They’re in a bar, it’s small and it’s cosy and it’s not the kind of place that he would be recognised which is why it’s perfect. She pours him a shot of whiskey from behind the counter because it’s harder in LA to get a legal tattoo artist job (or any other job for that matter) than one would think.

“That’s not true,” he frowns before downing the amber liquid in a go.

She stares at him pointedly from behind the bar.

“You always get a girl at the end of the year so that you have a cosy Christmas and a nice New Year and then a blowout birthday party and then you break up with them before Valentine’s Day because commitment scares you. There are multiple blogs dedicated to the this specific phenomenon.”

“Maybe,” he concedes, a ball of something hard and sour and guilty forming in the pit of his stomach.

“No. Definitely,” she says as she tops him up for another shot.

“Is that what you think of me?” Harry frowns.

There's a beat of noticeably tense silence.

“Is it untrue?” She quirks her eyebrow just a touch.

Harry drops his gaze to the liquid he’s been swirling around his glass, “Is it really so bad to just want someone?”

“Not usually, but it takes twenty-one days to make a habit and you’re in too deep.”

“What exactly are you insinuating?”

“I’m not insinuating anything, I’m flat out saying that you don’t know how to be alone,” Zaemira gleefully volunteers, completely without provocation, before topping up his drink again, “Which isn’t a shocker because you’ve never really been alone. Even when you snuck out to have your solo adventure in Rio, you dragged me along for the night. And now that the band’s on hiatus, you’re falling back into old habits with an ex.”

He promptly forgets how to fucking breathe.

She does that to him a lot, he realises.

Even though the band is officially on hiatus, he’s never felt more trapped. He feels caged in and claustrophobic in his own skin. That’s why he even took up that yacht holiday up at St. Barts. He had a physical urge to flee his life. To escape. But he didn’t think that it would become another source for frenzied paparazzi shots which fueled speculation and rumours.

He throws back the liquid in his glass in another swift go and feels the burn trickle down his throat.

“You keeping tabs on me, Zaemira?” He asks, playfully, with a teasing lilt in his voice.

She merely rolls her eyes at that.

“I’m just saying. Maybe it’s time to work on solo you.”

“You’re taking this bartender psychologist thing way too seriously.”

She opens her mouth to contest that but another patron is waving over at her from across the bar and she excuses herself to see to the obviously lost Wall Street gentlemen in the suit and tie.

The moment of silence allows Harry to think back over her words.

But her tinkering laughter cuts through his reverie.

Harry glances over and sees that Wall Street has a shit eating grin on his face, and something unpleasant churns in his stomach.

His friends were all coupling up, or getting engaged, or getting ready to pop out kids, and he realises that the only constant in his life over the two years has been their over-the-phone friendship. While media was content having him as a charming albeit a little secretive little fucker, a true lothario, kicking up rumours with grainy pictures, reaching out for a comment anytime he so much as speaks to a person of the opposite sex, she’d been his odd inner balance through it all.

And increasingly, he’s finding it difficult to share her with anyone else.

Zaemira has a lot of bad habits.

She knows that.

She smokes and she drinks and she gets some kind of perverse sort of thrill out of spending her inheritance from her dead father. First she spent his insurance payout on a graphic design degree that was basically just a piece of paper. And now it’s been four years and the inheritance her father willed her hasn’t run out (mostly because she takes odd jobs to earn her keep in the various cities she bums around in) and she’s certain that this is what a quarter life crisis must feel like.

Her mother left her when she was barely eight and it broke her father’s heart. She is resolved not to make the mistakes her father made though. She’s determined to live, truly live. Even if it means not having a place to call home, crashing on couches of new friends and old. Even if it means spending one way plane tickets around the world and living out of one packed bag. Even if it means sleeping with strangers and leaving the moment they showed any sign of weakness.

What it means, is that she isn’t ashamed of her life choices.

Mostly.

There’s the small matter of a newly acquired bad habit — answering a certain call from a certain pop star whenever he rang.

She knew who he was before he accidentally wandered into her temporary place of employment of course. He was the golden boy from the band. The Harry Styles from One Direction. She hadn't been aware of much else to be honest, just that he had his start in fame from that reality show everyone watched and was involved in a band that was hailed a new coming of The Beatles.

Apart from that, he had never been relevant to her life in any way.

So when he tumbled into the dodgy, seedy little tattoo joint in Rio and practically falls head first onto her feet, she catches sight of the oddly familiar looking guy who is too long limbs and all overgrown hair, it takes a full minute before she makes the connection.

She’d seen photographs of him before, photos and headlines on Facebook shared by news organisations (or what passes for news organisations on social media anyway), and she recalled the basic impression of this Hollywood favourite in the making; the t’ shirts and the tight jeans and the expensive shoes and the barely thought out tattoos. He was basically like any young rock star in the making, cheeky and reasonably good looking, and perfectly groomed for the media and the fandom to dislocate their jaw to swallow whole.

But the boy who stumbled into the small tattoo studio is not the boy she’d seen on the interwebs.

They become friends.

He tracks her down to her exact location whenever he’s in a city she’s in and she allows it.

When she finds herself in Los Angeles, he finds himself on hiatus.

The band had been splintering since Zayn left, that much was evident. And then the band went on their ‘break’. And he’s lonely, an ailment he had long suffered from far even before he became the Harry Styles of One Direction.

So it doesn’t surprise her when he saunters into the pub she’s working at for the past month and a half.

As a rule, she doesn’t drink on the job. She’s not allowed to. But it’s hard to say ‘no’ to Harry. He’s lonely and he’s heartbroken in more ways than one and they comes dangerously close to depleting the bar’s whiskey stock because it’s a shitty little hole-in-the-wall kind of place that doesn’t really stock up often and so they go back to his place after her shift.

The too big Los Angeles house came with a pool and a view and a fully stocked bar and one moment they’re drinking some more and the next he’s on his piano, absentmindedly playing a tune he has stuck in his head and talking about life.

She’d been good at not feeling. For a long time, she didn’t even have to try. Zaemira just didn't let herself feel for people like that and it was easy. But around him, it’s suddenly not.

He’s talking about being afraid, and how he’s afraid a lot, and how he doesn’t know what to do with himself, and how the house feels too big and he’s too alone.

She kisses him.

She kisses him because she doesn't like what he's saying, doesn't like what it means, doesn't like that this boy, this rock star, this heart of gold and boots to match who had the world on his feet could be as lost and lonely and confused as her.

She kisses him so he can stop talking, and she kisses him so she can stop listening.

It works out fine.

Except—

She isn't entirely sure why he kisses her back.

His name rolls with disturbing ease off the tip of her tongue and she thinks she can get used to the way he says her name when he comes. It sounds like a prayer and a punch, a gasping exhale that hits her in the chest, or maybe in her heart, and he collapses backwards onto his bed, pulling her close to him like she belongs there.

Zaemira doesn’t sleep a wink and when morning comes she leaves her latest find from a seedy bookstore downtown, Love Is a Dog from Hell, on his bedside before she walks out the front door.

The sun hits her straight in the eye, like the glare of a cafe employee when you ask if the have soy milk instead of regular full cream. The city was a place for the hopeful, she realises. The hope that one day you’ll find love. The hope that you’ll luck out. The hope that working hard will get you where you need to go, as long as you hope and never let go of that hope.

It was decidedly not a city built for her.

She was a shitty bartender and an even shittier dreamer and the only thing that’s been a constant in her life is her slowly expanding collection of tattered Bukowski books that she will gladly throw actual wearable clothes out of her overhead carriage bag to keep said books with her. Through the years, the only thing she could rely on was the gritty, filthy words that a dirty old man could provide.

And she had no problem sharing that part of her life with him at all.

paris

march 2018

It’s just a flash, but he swears he sees her in the crowd and he thinks he’s going mad.

He’s barely two weeks into his world tour. His solo world tour.

He should be thrilled. He should be basking in the victory of it all. The world is loud and roaring in his ears but in the dreams he barely remembers dreaming, he sees her there, quiet and serene and bright, as though he is finally seeing her in the light of day instead of in the cover of night. (As though his mind is trying to make up for memories that didn’t happen.)

Not too long ago, it was another face he sought out amidst the crowd in Paris. But he catches a flash of what he thinks is her and suddenly he can’t think of anything else.

Harry hasn’t seen Zaemira in two years. Two years and then some. Not since that night.

They call and they text and they avoid discussing what happened in his LA house or why she left before he woke with not even a note but just a book by his bedside table.

There was no designated moment, no exact timing, but their dynamic changed. Because life is not a Shakespearean tragedy where it’s all fade to black and bittersweet endings. There’s mundanity and somehow, they sought each other out more in that monotonous day-to-day.

Their friendship was stronger despite having flirted with the very line that kept them together. She’d gone home to London and was spending her time putting together fragments of a former life and her current life like a jigsaw, jamming the pieces together hoping they’ll fit while he, well, he had a movie to film, and then an album to write, and that same album to tour after. He’d also landed himself in another relationship. She’s a model, because as Zaemira would say, he’s a glutton for punishment and ‘no seriously, same lips red, same eyes blue, you so have a type.’

His ‘type’ gets along great with his friends and his mum likes how laidback she is when she was over for Christmas and it’s a relationship that he’s only sure has lasted for as long as it did because of the change in their friendship.

But then he realises that he hasn’t seen his friend in over two years and it suddenly doesn’t sound like a real friendship anymore.

He can’t shake the thought and the screaming fans do nothing to help set his mind straight.

His heart aches like a broken bone over something he can’t explain.

Barely off the the stage, he whips out his phone and calls.

“Sorry, wrong number,” he says.

“You know it isn’t,” she says, eyes flicking toward the living room as a burst of laughter carries itself to her ears.

Zaemira grabs her pack of cigarettes and shuts the front door gently as she exits, “What’s up?”

“Nothing.”

But she’s known him long enough to read into the subtext, the world that exist in between the words he’s actually saying.

“What’s wrong?” She asks again, determinedly, taking angry long strides down the road.

He sighs, voice sounding like it’s jumped through various hoops and crossed many a timeline in many universes to reach down the phone line to her.

“It’s nothing, Z.”

But she knows something is. Knows it from the way he says ‘Z’ instead of ‘Zaemira’. Or maybe she hopes it’s something more than knows it because she wants an excuse to see him. To wander the streets of London with him. To get drunk with him. Anything with him.

Where he’s calling her from, she wouldn’t know; could be a pub, a hotel, backstage of his concert, anywhere. And she’s not sure she wants to know. They haven’t physically seen each other since that night over two years ago.

Has it really been?

He’s travelling again, on tour, alone this time around, and his schedule always seems at odds with hers. Of course, it didn’t help that he’s seeing someone. She knows because he’d rung her up to ask if he should invite said someone home for Christmas and again to ask how many times you can ask someone to come to your concerts before it starts seeming narcissistic.

She pulls out a cigarette from the pack and puts it between her lips before lighting it, taking a long drag, trying to remember if there’d been any sign that his relationship had been on the rocks the last time he called.

Zaemira inhales the fumes while he quietly stays on the line.

Harry doesn’t say anything.

“How was the concert tonight?” She prods.

“It was good,” he says, but there’s no enthusiasm in his voice, just exhaustion, “Paris is always good.”

He doesn’t sound right.

It’s the stupidest, most clichéd thing ever, but he doesn’t sound like himself.

“Harry,” she says, voice softening because he’s quiet and he’s the one who called her and she has a horrible feeling that he’s about to cry and the last time he sounded like that on the phone, she found out that Robin had passed, “Has something... happened?”

He’s not saying anything, like he’s waiting for her to say something, and she doesn’t.

“I’m just… I’m having a minute”

Zaemira sighs.

Sometime in the past two years, she’s thought on more than one occasion that she might love him. Like proper love. More than just platonic love.

But other times he just feels so fucking far away that she’s not so sure anymore.

She heaves a not-quite calming breath and takes another drag of the cigarette before filling the line with chatter. Because she gets it. She gets that empty kick in the gut sometimes. She prattles on about how home doesn’t feel like home and even though life at home is, more or less, alright it feels like something is missing. She complains about her aunt who disapproves of her decision to spend the rest of her inheritance on getting her masters and she begins to outline in exhaustive detail just how dissatisfied she feels, how everything makes her feel like a shitty daughter and a shitty niece and a shitty friend and a shitty student and a shitty—whatever the fuck else she's failing at—when he cuts her off.

“When can I see you?” he asks, like they can pretend for a second that they haven’t spent the past two years apart, like they live on the same street and he could see her in an hour if he wanted to.

She flicks her eyes back towards the house, thinking of her aunt and her cousins and how they’ve been going on and on about this big Easter party they’ve been planning.

“Tomorrow?” She suggests, knowing full well that he can’t. Not really. He’s got schedules and plans and commitments.

And a girlfriend, a voice in the back of her head pipes in.

She doesn’t need to silence the voice though because reality has its way of doing that and she hears him exhale on the other end of the line, as though letting go of a breath he wasn’t aware he was holding.

“Tomorrow’s no good. How about day after?” Harry suggests, “I’ll be in Amsterdam. I’ll get you a ticket.”

And Zaemira thinks about that for a bit, seriously considers taking him up on the offer.

And then she thinks about him, about how maybe they’re like those horrible math love stories; like sine and cosine, meant to meet and fall apart every so often, forever out of step with one another.

She drops the cigarette to the ground and watches it burn.

“I don’t think I can do Amsterdam right now,” she says after a second, “I mean I have it on pretty good authority that if I don’t go to my classes I won’t be able to complete my masters.”

She chuckles to herself at the terrible not even remotely funny joke.

“I’ll be in London in April,” he says and she can hear his breathing all but stop on the line, like he was holding his breath for her answer and she almost wishes she’s not about to say what she’s about to say.

“I’ve got work on weekends.”

He sighs again and the line is heavy with words unsaid.

“See you after tour then?”

“Yeah,” she says, forcing a grin, forcing the lie, “Yeah, guess so.”

It’s quiet between for a bit. The silence is deafening and it steals her breath a little and she’s pretty sure it has nothing to do with the cigarette she just smoked.

And then the line goes dead.

london

december 2018

He doesn’t call her again after Paris.

His tour ends and his relationship ends and he half-heartedly makes excuses to himself and for himself for not calling; he's busy, of course he’s busy, he’s busy catching up with his mum and his sister and his ex co-workers and his industry friends and he tells himself that he doesn’t need anyone to help him get through the cold lonely winter nights.

But then it’s December and he calls and she picks up and they pick up exactly where they last left off. It felt good. It felt like breathing again. And he thought it was enough, but two days later, despite the promises he’s made to himself, he texts her a meme.

And then he calls again. And again. And again.

It would be almost like she’s his phone therapist except he’s also sort of keeping her functioning like a normal human that doesn’t lash out at people by texting him her darkest thoughts, so it evens out.

He’s realising with every call, and every passing day of his newly found (and truly enjoyed) singledom, that he was kind of a fuck-up. Not in any obvious, tangible, measurable way. He didn’t have a dozen different child of divorce issues, or problems with abandonment that run so deep he is constantly choosing to leave before he is left, or a mile long list of insecurities and fears that leave him utterly crippled, but he was fucked up in ways that were difficult to fully articulate.

And their relationship was a home that allows for it to be okay because they were both honest about just how fucked up they were.

Harry doesn’t know when exactly he figures it out, but he decides he’ll go see her in March. He’ll ring her and say ‘wrong number’ and she’ll call him a twat and then he’ll throw rocks at her window and hold up a copy of Bukowski she doesn’t yet have that he’ll have to find by then and yell, “Did someone order a creepy stalker?”

It’s a good plan. Except it’s two days to Christmas and she’s complaining about her cousins and her nieces and her nephews and how she just walked out when they were making pies together ahead of Christmas and now she’s just going to sequester herself in her shitty flat and spend the yuletide alone and he can’t help but smile at the whole thing because that’s so painfully Zaemira and he can’t help himself.

“I’ve got it planned out,” she says, “I’ll just Netflix and eggnog myself to sleep.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, come over to mine for Christmas,” he says, words tumbling out of his mouth completely of their own accord without passing through his head at all.

“Yeah, I’ll just come to Holmes Chapel at the drop of a hat,” she says sardonically.

“I’m serious. My mum won’t mind.”

“There aren’t any flights out, Haz.”

“I’m sure there is.”

“It’s fine. I’m used to it, I just called to rant anyway,” she says dismissively.

And Harry can see it play out at the back of his mind, the way her lips quirk, all wry and self-deprecating. Except there’s more of a bite to it than it usually would.

“What d’you mean you’re used to it?”

“I mean I only exist when it’s convenient for you,” she says it so matter-of-factly that he’s not sure if she’s making a piss poor attempt at a joke.

Her words are just so thoroughly her, and no one could say it without sounding like an attention seeking arse, but they hit him square in the gut and Harry feels all semblance of breathable air leave his body.

“Hold up—” He starts but she’s having none of it.

“You’ll see me when you see me. It’s fine, don’t worry about it.”

She changes the subject and tells him to bring over ‘like ten crates of Vodka’ when he ever decides to drop by because she’s acquired a taste for it and he chuckles half-heartedly at that.

He makes a joke about her trip to Russia and she’s saying how she should have tried harder to seduce an oligarch. But he’s roughly only a quarter present. His mind is a riot. It’s like the time in school some kid hit him with a baseball bat and he feels all the blood rush to his head.

His gut twists with a vague, rumbling kind of horror.

The words left unspoken stings more than it should.

I don’t want to be your next winter cling anyway.

Her door buzzes.

It’s Christmas eve and she isn’t expecting anyone, but when she rushes down the hallway to open the building door, there he is.

It’s pure electricity in his eyes and a fire so hot in her bones that it feels like ice.

It’s been a full thirty-five months since she’d seen him in person and not through her phone. That’s almost three whole years. They’re just shy a week of the anniversary of that night and he’s still just so pretty. Painfully pretty.

He cracks the weakest smile she’s ever seen, “Hey.”

“What are you—”

“You’re not a winter cling,” he blurts out, eyes ringed red and slightly swollen like he’d been crying or up all night.

Or both.

She ignores the statement, crossing her arms across her chest as they stand out in the cold.

“Did you drive here all night from Holmes Chapel?”

“I wanted to wait. I wanted to wait until after Valentine’s Day. Because you’re not something to hold onto while I wait out the loneliness.”

“Harry—”

“Do you remember the night we met? In Rio? I was tired. I was so tired of being who they expected me to be,” he interrupts her, plaintive and gentle, “It’s why I got so drunk and slipped security. I wanted something that was just mine.”

He takes a step forward and she holds her ground, still not inviting him in. She’s not sure she wants to. Like the hours she spend not sleeping in his arms, she’s not sure she wants to be another warm body to him. But Harry is staring at her, expression terrifyingly open, honest, and contemplative, like he's looking right through her to her heart.

“Like a me tattoo on your body?”

Zaemira hates that she’s doing exactly what her aunt says she does when she’s uncomfortable; makes terrible jokes and thinly-veiled badly-timed humour in an attempt to hide her discomfort which never helps.

She hates that her aunt is right and she hates that this is how she’s realising it.

“Every other relationship I had never felt right,” Harry continues, holding her gaze as though he is equally fascinated and terrified, “Something was always missing.”

The tick-tock pounding thump of her heartbeat is so loud and gushing she can practically feel it in her veins. But he just keeps going, heart on his sleeve at the door of the girl he spent three drunken nights with and fell into bed once. As though he didn’t know he had the power to so completely destroy her.

There’s a taunting, almost brittle quality to what he’s saying that it makes her nervous. He’s making her nervous and it pricks like annoyance at the back of her head. It’s jarring what he’s saying. Striking.

“People aren’t answers to whatever mess that’s going on in your life, Harry.”

It's ridiculous and it's rude and it’s out of control and out of character for her except—

Except that it isn’t.

She wonders when exactly he’d figured it out.

And how it took her so long to realise that she’s the same as what she’s accusing him of.

She wants and wants and wants and then she takes, and takes, and takes, until she inevitably loses interest, and leaves.

And most people just let her.

But Harry isn’t most people.

And he’s there now to show her exactly that.

“I don’t want people,” he says so softly it’s practically a whisper, like he’s confiding a secret, like he knows that the harder she pushes the more she wants you to fight for her, “I just…want you. I just didn’t realize there was a difference between wanting you to want something and wanting you for you.”

The words slot into her heart perfectly like a deck of cards. The words that she never even knew she wanted to hear.

They taste like a perfectly brewed shot of espresso and too expensive whiskey all mixed into one heartstopping drink and she wants to savour the shockwave-sweet intensity of the moment.

She hesitates. And then, “Careful, Styles. Or I might think you’re trying to flirt with me.”

He grins at that. A real smile curving on his lips.

“Oh, I’m definitely trying to flirt with you.”

He tucks a stray curl behind her ears, simultaneously keeping his distance and drawing her close.

Her breath hitches on a tremulous little laugh.

She's paralysed with an emotion that feels a lot like fear and it's scraping at her skull, rhythmically ebbing into all corners of her brain like a growing virus and he's just there, staring at her.

She wants to say something. Something smart or witty or funny. But instead she just lets herself fall forward into his arms and onto his lips.

It tastes like a promise.

It tastes right.

It tastes like two beating hearts and a slow summer burn.

#1dff #exchanges

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