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Distance was a funny thing, Luke decides.
It’s such an unpredictable sentiment.
Everyone knows that absence makes the heart grow fonder and that being away from someone you love can spark that part of you that longs for them, and once you’ve returned to that love it becomes stronger than before.
But distance is also a form of complete change.
Removing yourself from a situation you don’t want to deal with anymore is a change. Detaching yourself from emotions, memories, feelings - even people is a form of change; you won’t be around to experience said thing anymore.
And that’s exactly what Luke wanted, to detach and remove and distance himself from the person who had hurt him the most.
Mind you, it was hard. Going from acquaintance to band mate to best friend to boyfriend then back to best friend was too many swift changes that had happened in the midst of Luke and Calum’s relationship, and Luke couldn’t handle it anymore. There was something mentally draining about seeing those big brown eyes and gorgeous smile – eyes that used to shine and a smile that lit up especially for him – now do those things for another. It was the worst kind of torture to be a bystander and watch a person that you had put so much time and effort and love into choose someone else. Cruel and merciless and punishing: those are the words Luke uses in his head to describe how he feels about how this all turned out, and they roll around in his jumbled brain over and over and over again.
He distances himself because he has questions – so many questions – that he wants Calum to answer. The “why me?” and the “why him?” the occasional “what did I do?” and the always present “was I not good enough for you?” plagued him day and night. He wanted to know where the love Calum had stored up for him and kept silent about unless whispered against Luke’s lips was now vivacious and alive and ever present wherever he and Ashton went. Sometimes Luke even wonders if it was really love, or was he just a ruse in Calum’s game to achieve Ash’s heart.
Luke does so many things to cope with this; makes Calum the villain in his head - just some regular “fuck and run” kind of guy until he finds the person he really wants, or lies to himself and says it’s only a matter of time before the same thing happens to Ash, maybe even to Michael.
Other times he blames himself. He obviously wasn’t enough; there was something about him that made Calum no longer want him anymore. That had to be the reason.
The thing is Luke can’t bear to handle the answer to any of those questions, so he distances himself even more so he has no desire to ask them.
He’s changed because of this situation; he went from being quiet because he’s shy to being quiet because he doesn’t want to talk, he keeps to himself and doesn’t really speak unless spoken to first, and ultimately he’s a shell of the person he used to be. It makes him feel pathetic that a boy, a person, could make him feel this way about himself again. This brings up all those negative emotions about himself back up to the surface, and it’s as if he’s hyperaware of everything he does that’s wrong or stupid in his mind and tries to change it. He feels like he’s back in year 9 where he was awkward and lonely, hate pooling inside of him at himself and new red scars appearing on his wrists because he had nobody and knew that nobody wanted him.
It was a sickening feeling he felt. He had gained so much confidence in who he is and his abilities that the person he used to be was almost tucked away in the back of his mind, forgotten and never to be thought of again. But when Luke detaches from one thing, he attaches to something else, and even though the rational part of his mind is telling him that none of the things he feel about himself are true, but he shrugs that off and lets the darkness that used to be in him overtake him. It’s then that Luke realizes that the problem wasn’t Calum, the problem was him and how he let other people affect him and made them give him his own self-worth instead of him giving it to himself. Calum wasn’t the villain or the bad guy here, he was simply the balance that Luke relied on to keep himself leveled, and he had unknowingly tipped the scales.
Everyone could see the shift in Luke and it set off different feelings in all of them. Michael was angry, because he was the only person Luke confided in about the Calum breakup so he knows why Luke is like this and that it broke him, and he can’t stand it. Ashton was saddened by it, because he didn’t know what had changed and why it did; he was the only one in the band who didn’t know about Luke and Calum’s past. Luke was like his little brother and he couldn’t stand seeing him like this and not know what’s wrong and he didn’t know how to fix it. Calum had seemingly turned a blind eye to Luke in the aftermath of coming out with Ashton and when he really saw what kind of affect this was having on the boy, it made him sick. He knew what he did was wrong, and as fucked up as it sounded he never wanted to hurt Luke, especially to revert him back to his old self. That was never his intention, but he knew it was too late for it to be fixed.
The shift in Luke put a rift in the band and how they communicated as friends. It just wasn’t the same dynamic that they had before and it seemed to take a toll on all of them and Luke felt like the cause of it all, which only added to guilt to the myriad of terrible emotions he was already dealing with. It was never ending – the uneasy tension between all of the boys – and it made Luke snap.
It wasn’t a completely conscious decision, he just knew he needed to be away from the boys and forget about this situation for a while, maybe even start working on how to be okay without anyone’s help, but he knows that whatever he needs to do he can’t do it in this environment.
So he leaves.
Just packs up some of his stuff up and leaves their semi-permanent L.A. house and gets on a plane back to Sydney and half a day later is back with his mom in his home and it feels like he can breathe again. He has no idea how long he’ll be there, but he knows the boys can’t manage the band without him for long and he’ll have to come back eventually.
But for now, Luke needed to be in his own space and get back to himself; find some good in his life.
He needed to find some distance. And though distance is a change, he was content with this.
Because change is always good.