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All of that was nothing but a play. And Zayn couldn’t stand it anymore. He stared at himself in the mirror — he seemed about to puke — and felt pity for himself. In the first commercial break, he excused from the others and ran away to the bathroom: he was feeling his structures collapsing. All of that was killing him slowly, squirming his guts, like acid corroding metal, from the inside. And, suddenly, Liam’s voice broke into the bathroom’s air through the door:
— Zain, you’re alright?
There was a note of sweet worry in his voice, but mixed with measured caution. What just made Zayn’s stomach contract even more.
— I’m fine, Liam — Zayn replied (lied), without moving and taking his hand to his eyes —, I’m just not... not in the mood to talk right now.
He sighed. Under his lids, he saw shapeless blurry lights, like in screens: blurry TV screens, fuzzy broken scenes. His heart pounded so hard that it confused his ears. His hands were shaky and cold. When Liam replied him, he held back his will to cry:
— I’m not leaving — he said, with a lower tone, almost whispering. — Not until you tell me everything’s fine.
Bold of him, Liam, in demanding such thing. Because he knew everything was not fine. It’s been a few years that everything was not fine.
Since when they first met, Zayn and Liam are like the sky and the land: they touch each other, they permeate each other and they expand each other, so they can wrap the whole world. Without notice, Zayn used to feel a huge euphoria every time he was around Liam. But this euphoria was short lived. Soon enough he found out the fact of the Wolverhampton’s lad having a girlfriend hurt him very deeply. Soon enough he found out his heart went cold when their hands touched, at random. Soon enough he found out he felt an irresistible will to hug him for thinking he’s too cute. Soon enough he found out he thought only about him.
However, Liam had a girlfriend.
It seemed like a Shakespearian tragedy, which would end in suicide or madness. The latter option, actually, seemed more possible: in spite of her image that always used to come to Zayn’s mind, in spite of his Homeric efforts to censor himself, when they got on stage, all of this dissolved. A bubble of some sort sewed up around them and built up a separated world, where both of them sang to one another... like they were true words.
And the they were. From both sides. But Liam didn’t know. It took very long, but he noticed that, for the first time in his life, he was in love with a man. Still, we have to give it: it wasn’t any man, it was Zain Malik. He discovered himself like someone who discover the face of a newborn child, the culmination of a love that patiently waited to overflow.
— I love him — he mumbled in the heat of his epiphany. — I love Zain.
Harry stared him with an arched eyebrow and mumbled, before turning his eyes back to his cellphone’s screen:
— You were literally the last one to know.
Of course, after a few years of resentment — and, specially, after a show in which Liam’s girlfriend was in the audience —, Zayn wilted, had dried liked an old flower. Necessary death in the middle of the summer. He was ready to burry his love, he was ready to burry himself. When Liam ran to him. It was even a funny scene: Zayn, really angry, didn’t want to talk, and Liam, annoyed, didn’t accepted to be ignored. The two of them practically got into a physical fight before Liam could say what he had discovered.
— But what about Danielle? — Zayn asked, widened eyes, short breath after a long kiss.
— I won’t stay in a relationship rooted in a lie — Liam replied with a flash of determination in his eyes.
Or at least he intended to. However, they ended up falling into a world of appearances, numbers and marketing, an infinity of tenuous lines that tangled around them, sticking them in a malefic web. Your public is mostly female, you can’t come out as a couple.
Before they could notice, Zayn also had a girlfriend.
Some pictures on Instagram, some flagrants in public, if it was only that it wouldn’t be that bad. But even behind the cameras, even behind closed doors, there was a conspiracy, a conscious effort from the team to make Zayn and Liam to mismatch, to have the less possible, invasion of privacy. Truth was their love had no place there.
The other lads in the band were sorry for them and sometimes they even fought to protect their friends. But so little they could do: they had their hands tied. The mood in the team was heavy since Harry and Louis started to date, and, from the moment Liam and Zayn finally woke up from an essential sleep, a kind of dictatorship settled down on them, all of them: even Niall, who until then was only dedicated to their music, ended up waning totally, caught up in this game of prohibitions and sanctions, staying away from any real relationship for years now.
Wasn’t it unfair enough the fact that they couldn’t even control their own diet?
The feeling was deadly agony: everyone turned into sick earth.
The monolith, the main stone that held them all together, a highly noble feeling, a mix of friendship, admiration and even affection — perhaps love — was, the whole time, attacked. It was, slowly, dying. Increasingly, Zayn babbled, babbles only: it was getting even harder to bring out of his heart — or somewhere inside of him that he doesn’t quite know — pretty melodic rhymes, pretty love stories. He tried, of course, sought to inspire in his love for Liam, in the small touches, in the kisses, in the laughs...
But everything, naturally, with time, came up coated in melancholy, black bile ran down his mouth like honey of disgust and frustration: the names we like to say change with time and age. At some point, however, he heard a snap inside of him, with a heat, close to his heart which he couldn’t — shouldn’t — abide by, cross his arms and accept. He had fought so much to get there, it wasn’t right to let some assholes screw everything up!
He wore, therefore, a worse version of himself.
“No, sir”, “no way” e “I don’t want to” were the words that started to come out of his mouth more frequently. He knew, of course, the limit where he could go to, but, either way, he still got punched in the stomach a few times. Anyway, his biggest weapon wasn’t “no”, but the disobedience: he’ll never forget the time when, as soon as the lights dimmed down on stage, he kissed Liam, right in front of everyone, along the shadows. And that wasn’t the only time.
You’re playing with fire, they told him, but he didn’t intend to stop. It was Sartre who said that hell is other people, but he was wrong: hell is the potency that others have to trigger it on us; hell is to submit. On a gray afternoon, somewhere in Europe, Zayn sat on the bed of his hotel room and looked at the landscape outside. Harry passed by him (obviously the team would not let he and Liam share the same room) and joked:
— You don’t need to act like he was dead, you know.
With a shaky sigh, Zayn replied:
— But it is.
— Who?
— My self.
— It’s not dead — Harry said, staring him from the suite bathroom —, it’s just destroyed. But life’s like that: we’re only able to build our selves after someone knock down whatever other people built for us. It’s about time for Zayn to say who Zayn is.
Malik thought for a few moments in silence, looking at the room’s expensive wooden floor. He tried to seek inside of him the words to reply that question, but he started to struggle when he noticed he couldn’t find them. Harry, now lied in the bed on his side, seeing his friend’s struggle, comforted him:
— You don’t have to say it, right here, right now. Find out your self isn’t the greatest pleasure.
— You’re so sure about yourself, have you found your self already?
Harry nodded, closing his eyes serenely, before saying:
— For now, yes, later on, who knows, I’ll have to search for me again.
— And how did you do it?
— Doesn’t matter — he replied, shaking his head —, you can’t expect me, or anyone else, to guide you. Sorry, mate, but you’re on your own.
He still hadn’t found himself, it’s true, but, at the moment in which he looked at himself in the mirror, Zayn was sure that wasn’t the Zayn that Zayn wanted to be. He sighed. The bitter taste of heartache in his mouth. He opened the door, already feeling a couple of tears rolling down his face. He stared Liam’s face barely: he was the anchor that grounded him, that kept him from fusing with the sea, becoming one with the dark salty water.
They stared at each other for too long, in silence, a lot of words stayed implied, but they saw each other in a very true way. Both of them were real. You still remember my eyes, even if the Man In Black flashed their light into your eyes. Liam tried to kill the deafening space between them, but Zayn stopped him, placing a hand over his chest and said:
— I’m leaving One Direction.
Liam felt his hands trembling, his mouth going dry, his eyes widened right away.
— What... what do you mean?... Are you going to leave us?... Are you going to leave me?...
— No, don’t get it this way, you’ll always be here — he said, placing a hand over the left side of his chest.
I don’t quite know what Liam replied, or if at least he had words to reply. Probably babbled for too long, trying to argue, trying to coax Zayn to stay. At first, he understood that Zayn was leaving him, leaving his love... who could blame him?... But there’s things in the world, in people, that, sometimes, we’re going to brood and brood and we’re never going to understand. It’s part of the great torture of being human. But I’m sure that Zayn shut him with a kiss, wet with tears, from both of them at this point.
For the second time this night, it feels right. And, then, it’s only you and I.
— Please, stay... — Liam made one last appeal.
— No, I’m not staying, Liam, I’ve already made up my mind.
— But why? I don’t understand...
— ‘Cause I don’t wanna say what’s scripted... whether if you are or aren’t with it... I know what I need.
Perhaps these weren’t the exact words Zayn said in that moment, but the idea is similar. This time I’m sure Liam stayed quiet, catatonic for the rebelliousness Zayn developed, a behavior that made him suffer so much: he was afraid, it’s comprehensible, even Zayn knew there were a lot of battles to fight, he had a lot to take; he intended, however, to come out of this war victorious, or so they could bury him right away. He didn’t want to live as slave.
Zayn’s speech was enough. Of course, he still had mature the idea, but Liam could get a pinch of comprehension of Zayn’s place and, like he had promised a lot of times before, he would be at his side against the whole world. Liam smiled with a mix of mourn and jubilee, still overwhelmed between so controversial feelings, like something had just died there. It died, to something else to be born. Accomplishing changes so radical is always very difficult, but he knew his existence, as an artist and as a person, could go a lot further than that. And all of theirs.
They kept to exchange a few more there, standing at the bathroom’s door, a lot of tears came out, but I can’t reproduce them here: it was a too much intimate dialogue, words were spoken from each only to the other. They spoke about the path that unravel in front of them, the future which was not so certain and comfortable now, and the fights they’ll have to face to reach freedom. Whatever it was they imagined that freedom is, they were so young and full of dreams: they just knew that they wanted it more than anything.
And there’s not wrong about it.