Your Creation • Zarry

81. Existing

May 2019

I hadn't seen or spoken to Zayn ever since he picked himself up off the floor the night that he ended things with me and left and I spent the remainder of my night crying myself to sleep and decided that right after the holidays were over I was going to get away. I needed to do some serious soul searching and there was no better place in the world to do it than in my favorite place, Japan. So I spent five weeks there hanging out with friends, including one of the coolest guys I'd ever met, Kunichi Nomura, who I met through Camille. I pretty much spent the whole time there writing, reading "Norwegian Wood" by Haruki Murakami and listening to "Blue" by Joni Mitchell and "Arrow Through Me" by Wings on repeat and doing everything in my power to try and get over having lost both Zayn and Camille.

And when I got back from Japan the first thing I realized was that I needed therapy because distraction wasn't the answer. Drinking, saying "I'm fine" and "fake it till you make it" while desperately attempting to fill the void with people, places and things were all the ways that I had ever coped with stress and sadness before and so far none of it seemed to be helping me in any real way, all my relationships have failed, I was totally lost and needed direction, so I went to Los Angeles and found a therapist and basically told her my entire life story.

I think that was probably the best decision I ever made.

What I learned so far was that I was more co-dependent than I even knew. So many of the happiest times in my life were with Zayn and so many of the saddest times in my life were because of Zayn and it all came down to one common theme and that was him. He impacted me so deeply that he was part of me; he completely took hold of who I was and I didn't know how to see past that for the longest time. Could I ever be happy without him? Could I ever really love anyone else? Was it even possible? I still didn't know, but what I had to do now was devote this time to myself, because serious self-love and acceptance was missing from the equation.

All I was doing was writing songs, going to therapy, and opening up to all my friends and having these real, heavy conversations about life and I felt like this tremendous weight was being lifted from my shoulders. I had plans to just be myself, to dress how I wanted to, act how I wanted to, say what I wanted to and I had everyone in my corner ready to support me through it. This was my time to step into the light and I wasn't ever going back.

But nothing could keep me from missing Zayn and it was something that I was no longer trying to fight against, but my therapist told me to just feel how I felt and let it in and out, so I did and even though I didn't talk to him and even though I wanted to, I stayed away and quietly missed him to myself, hoping that he was doing okay. I had the urge to want to check in and see how he was feeling, what he was up to, what was going on, but I couldn't. So I just kept writing songs.

One day in the studio Jeff came up to me and put his arm around my shoulder after I just finished recording "Adore You" and he shook his head at me while I hid my smile.

"You're still going to write this whole album about Zayn aren't you?" he asked.

"I wouldn't be me if I didn't."

It's what I knew and I was going to sing about him until my lungs collapsed and for me that was therapeutic because it was the only place where I could let myself be completely honest and that's exactly what I planned on doing, even if we weren't together anymore and even if I was trying to move past it, I was going to celebrate that relationship with him because our love was unlike anything else and we deserved that much.

I flew into New York during the first week of May for the Met Gala, which I was attending with a good friend of mine named Ale, otherwise known as the Gucci God, and I was co-chairing it, which was really fucking cool. We were in his hotel room looking through garments one night, trying to decide what to wear and since the theme was camp, it was the perfect excuse to really dress up. It was the first time that I was going to be able to wear something more "feminine" and get away with it, so I looked at it as my first big step into something that I wanted to further express. It finally felt like I was freeing myself and aside from my stylist Harry and designer Harris Reed, Ale was the biggest supporter in terms of fashion that I had.