And Scene [H.S]

scene twenty-two

HARRY STYLES

To say I am struggling would be an understatement. I was feeling so out of touch with reality, with this movie, with my family, though more importantly my wife. The sun of my whole universe. Without her, I'm nothing, and yet just recently we've been a million miles away, though through no fault of her own. It had all been down to me and I had to admit that, but it was just so incredibly hard to come to terms with my emotions and really recognise what was going through my mind.

For as long as I can remember, I have been an actor, from my very first memory up until now, pretending to be someone else is all I know. It had been so ingrained within me that I was having a difficult time separating the two. I seemed to believe that if I pretended that I was okay enough, then nothing would ever touch me. I kept believing that I was on a film set and that none of this was my actual life. If I pretend just enough, I could fool myself to believe it.

Every night when I settled to sleep on the sofa, pulling a light blanket over my body and resting my head down after a long day, the realisation slowly creeped in that none of this was an act. It's all very much real and that was the part I was struggling with the most.

I was struggling to decipher what was real and what was merely an act for the cameras. The lines had blurred far too much and this was my breaking point.

I was too easily brushing my life under the carpet like it was just another day on set and every night I laid awake on the sofa for hours, staring at the ceiling as I replayed the scenes through in my head. I'd dissect every conversation I had had throughout the day and the way I had treated Avie as if she was dirt on my shoe.

I seemed to be able to recognise that, when the lights had gone out and it was just me tucked up on the sofa with the world on my shoulders. By the time the morning rolled around and the lights had come back up, it was like a light just switched and I refused to acknowledge that I was in the wrong. It was almost painful for me to do so and I knew that was an incredibly toxic trait to have, but it was something that was difficult to reverse once it had become such a fixed habit, especially in this industry.

Avie kept trying to get me to talk, and even I had made an attempt to sit down with her and converse like two adults, but before we knew it, things were always getting out of hand and suddenly we were both shouting at one another, begging for each other to see it through our eyes as fires raged within us.

We were both too troubled for our own good and there was a terrifying part of me that wondered if our fun had been and gone. There was part of me that questioned if what we had just wasn't there anymore and no matter how desperately we tried to revive our marriage, I was fearful that it was already six foot under and there was nothing else we could possibly do.

Some things just weren't meant to be and whilst I thought Avie and I had the rest of our lives to go, fate didn't seem to play out in that way.

It seemed like however hard I tried, we weren't taking any steps forward, not even baby steps, we were still stuck where we started and I knew that was beginning to frustrate Avie. It was playing on my mind at all hours of the day, and after walking out on Avie two days ago, I had finally begun to realise that perhaps I wasn't doing enough. Whilst I thought I was making huge changes, in reality, I mustn't have been doing very much at all if we were still at square one with no progress being made in the slightest.

I was afraid it was over before it had even began for us. The directors knew what they wanted from us, the script had already been written and the stars were aligned. Like Romeo and Juliet.