Your Creation • Zarry

67. Always on my mind

February 2018

This was going to be the first birthday I had where I didn't throw some big party with all my friends and get hammered. Instead I was opting for a quiet party with just my family and the people closest to me because I wasn't feeling up to a rager mood this year. I was feeling bummed as well because Camille was gone for fashion month and I had been avoiding Zayn, again.

Being stubborn and jealous were by far my worst two personality traits. I jumped into the studio immediately and recorded the last song I had written, which I called "Fine Line" and I couldn't stop listening to it. I just kept thinking about how there was really no other way to describe the situation that Zayn and I were always in. It was a fine line between just about everything when it came to us. Opening up and being closed off, love and hate, jealousy and understanding, here and far away, talking and silence, being together and then being with other people, and we kept toeing this line between the two year after year and sometimes it seemed like we were getting somewhere and other times it felt like we were just going around in circles.

I didn't want to avoid Zayn, but I knew better than to try and talk to him when I wasn't in a good mood. I just didn't want to fight anymore and I felt emotionally exhausted. It wasn't even just Zayn that I didn't want to fight with, but it was myself as well. I felt like I was in this battle with myself, like I wanted so badly to just be out and free, to be loud and honest, to just say whatever the fuck I wanted to say, dress how I wanted to dress, be whoever I wanted to be without any more smoke screens to hide behind, but I kept stopping myself from completely going for it. Maybe it was too soon. Maybe I was too afraid of what the rest of the world would think of me and maybe I was scared of pushing Zayn too far away.

I woke up in my London home to the gate buzzer going off on the morning of my 24th birthday. I crawled out of bed and grabbed a robe, shuffling down the stairs towards the front door to see a man holding a large bouquet of sunflowers outside, so I let him through and he walked up to my front door.

"Delivery for Mr. Harry Styles," he said, handing me the bouquet along with a large card in a white envelope.

"Thank you very much," I replied, taking the flowers inside.

As I walked to the dining table to put the vase down, I grabbed the card and proceeded to open it.

In Greek Mythology there once was this girl named Clytie who fell in love with Apollo and every time he flew overhead she would be standing in her garden just staring up at him longingly, but she wasn't allowed to. Apollo's chariot burned so bright for a reason, because he wasn't supposed to be seen, but Clytie just couldn't stop until one day he got so fed up with her foolishness that he shot a sun arrow down at her, turning her into a sunflower and till this day, sunflowers still face the sun, still longing for him.

Loving you is painful that's why I'm a masochist.

Z

I stared at the beautiful arrangement of sunflowers, taking me back to the time when Zayn had once told me something similar, like the time where he swore that I was like Apollo and he was Icarus who had fallen from melted wings after getting too close and now he was back there, back to comparing me to the sun like I was some kind of God. I sighed and put the card down, leaning forward to smell the flowers and I couldn't help but smile to myself because they were beautiful and it was, once again, a very Zayn like gift.

I ran back upstairs to grab my phone and saw that Zayn had posted something on Instagram as well. Even though I had been avoiding him for a few weeks he still never failed to keep up the tradition of putting out something around my birthday, but this time it was a little video of him just messing around with a guitar.