ERIN SHERRY / IMAGINE YOU MEET HARRY STYLES ON A BUSY STREET
He looks really hot and he fancies your look! It’s spring, slushy brown snow crushed into the sidewalk cracks, and you’re wearing this big wool coat that makes you look a little like an animal, bumbling bearish through the city. There’s a bright white sun, the annoying kind, and you’re squinting into it so hard you almost miss Harry Styles parting the rush hour crowd like the red sea and floating towards you. Everyone’s got somewhere to be and Harry Styles almost goes unnoticed. There’s an itchy rash on your neck and your big coat might be a little too much for the weather. You probably smell sort of sweaty and goatish. You wonder if Harry Styles has ever been near a wild animal, or smelled one. Harry Styles touches your elbow, pours his chameleon green eyes into your empty animal ones, and wonders where you’re going. Anywhere, you tell Harry Styles, and mean it. You’d been on your way to lunch with an old friend but you skip it. You’ve got a dermatologist appointment later, but you skip that, too. The rash settles itself. You go wherever Harry Styles wants you to go.
Imagine a friend who might secretly want the worst for you sets you up on an awful blind date. The guy arrives all beastly and boring and you can’t agree on what music to play in the car so you ride to the zoo in silence. He picked the place; you wish you’d had some kind of say. You lean over the edge of the gorilla pit and watch two apes mate ferociously. A crowd forms above them. The apes bleat and grunt and rip at each other’s fur and everyone's cheering and taking pictures with their phones, waving lighters in the air like lit candles. It’s disgusting! You kind of hate it and your date’s blushing and he won’t look at you and you kind of hate him, too. You imagine wanting him the way the female ape wants the male ape. You imagine he’s Harry Styles. Imagine you and Harry Styles are two apes in a tree-filled pit, his signature string of pearls matted into his fur. Imagine plucking bugs out of the hair on Harry Styles’ back, crushing them like candy under your tongue. Imagine Harry Styles picking up your date by his shirt collar and biting his head clean off between his perfect, pearly ape teeth. Imagine a desire so deadly. You read somewhere that monkeys might be capable of believing in some kind of god. Imagine you and Harry pressing your furry palms together in prayer. Imagine pounding Harry Styles’ chest with your fists. Imagine you and Harry Styles and a wilderness.
Imagine you’re a sad hungry orphan. The most wicked, warty nun spits in your face to wake you up in the morning. You push cold gruel around your mouth with a rusty spoon. You’re covered in spider bites, but if you had a nice bottle of soap and time for a proper shower, you imagine you could almost be pretty. Everything’s rotten and gray, until the day one of the nuns comes clamoring into your cold concrete room in the dungeons and tells you to pack your bags. The alligators and minotaurs, two headed monkeys and baby stealers try to grab your ankles and pull you back down with them, but the nun drags you up the stairs where everything is headache bright and buzzing with something splendid. In the foyer, Harry Styles is waiting to rescue you. It’s like he’s glowing, you think, or like he’s wearing a big halo. Around Harry Styles, all the gray disappears. He doesn’t even have a shadow. He’s all light. Hi there, Harry Styles says. I’m your new dad. Let’s go home, my love. You move into Harry Styles’ mansion in London and he’s the best dad ever! He buys you everything you want, reads you stories before bed, tells his chef to cook all your favorite foods for dinner. You take bubble baths in a clawfoot tub and Harry Styles scrubs your shoulders until you sparkle. He brings gifts, puddings, sticky treats. You eat until your stomach’s swollen and supper is spoiled. You fall asleep in front of the fireplace. Harry Styles carries you to bed, tucks you in and checks the closets for monsters. You don’t want anything else in the world. You have it all. You don’t even have to dream.
Imagine you buy the Harry Styles wax figure from the discontinued One Direction exhibit at the Madame Tussuads museum. It’s modeled after a sixteen year old Harry, his skin baby soft, his biceps skinny. He’s wearing a silky school boy blazer over a scoop neck t-shirt, and you run your fingers along his mouth, his collarbone, the paved canal between his pecs. He’s sitting with his hands folded in the gap between his parted legs. His white shoes are so clean. All of him is. It’s like he’s never been anywhere! You sit him in a little chair in the corner of your room. Wax Harry watches everything you do. Sometimes he’s so distracting you forget what you’re doing and sit there watching him, too. You could stare at him all day. His hair feels almost real when you plough your fingers through it. You wonder what it’s made of, who it belonged to before it belonged to him, to you. You practice kissing Wax Harry. You pretend he’s alive, that it’s really him, that he cradles your head in his not-wax hand and kisses you back. You lift his wax body into bed beside you and take off all his wax clothes. He doesn’t have any nipples—the real Harry has four (bad British genetics)—or a penis or a naval. He’s a smooth slab of not-quite-boy. You try to bend his wax arms and legs down flat so he can lay with you, but they snap at the joints and you can’t get them to stick back together. You try to make Harry Styles whole again, but it’s harder than you thought it’d be. Your bed is littered with his dismembered limbs, fingers, toes sticking up like stalagmites. His wax head smiles up at you from the pillow. Eventually you get tired of the Lego puzzle of him, the slimy film of all his wax on your hands. You fall asleep. Your body coils like a fox into the crook of a wax elbow. You dream Harry Styles is real. You dream he’s yours.
Imagine Harry Styles is a hobby and you can buy him in a kit at the craft store. You can paint his nails and braid his hair and dress him up in little outfits and do whatever you want with him. You can shake him like a Magic 8-Ball and he’ll tell you yes no maybe ask again. You can paint him like a model ship, tie rocks to his ankles before dropping him into the sink to see if he’ll float. You can massage him like lotion into your stupid red rash (it keeps coming back. It’s peeking out of your shirt collar now) and he’ll soothe you from the outside in. You can shred him into thread and crochet him into a warm pair of gloves. You can wear the gloves like a second skin. Imagine you shrink Harry Styles down into the size of a wrinkled golden raison and carry him around in your shirt pocket. He beats his tiny fists against your breast and if you plug your ears to the sounds of his crying out for freedom it could almost be a heartbeat. You can furnish a fish tank with plastic trees and marbles and plop Harry Styles inside, teach him to do backflips in the water by tapping your fingers on the glass and rationing his fish flakes. You can imagine all this and he’ll make it happen and he won’t be able to hurt you or tell you no. He’ll just have to do it.
Imagine you get tickets to a One Direction concert! 2014, Midnight Memories era. Imagine there are a billion possible ways it could go but two are your favorite. In one, Harry Styles looks all the way up into the nosebleeds, sees you swaying in the sea of ugly rabid nobodies, and orders his assistant to huff all the way up the bleachers and bring you backstage. In his dressing room after the show, it’s all hot breath and bodies, the discovery of new tattoos tucked in hard-to-find places you hadn’t even known he’d had—and you thought you knew everything about him!—whispers and hair in your hands and explosions, one right after another. It never stops. He never stops! He’s Harry Styles and he’s a superhero and you love him so much it hurts, real pain like a fist in your ribs, closing tight around something vital. Imagine you’re having real, actual sex with Harry Styles and it’s great. It’s the best! It’s like lightning, it’s like licking the best tasting batter out of the grains of a big wooden spoon, and more than once you forget to breathe. But you and Harry Styles share a set of lungs now. You’re two slimy slugs stuck together. You slurp him up into you. You’re so full.
The other way you imagine the concert could go is like this: you’re in the very front row. The lights go down, the boys come out. They’re so perfect. God, you love them! You hear the opening notes of “What Makes You Beautiful,” but instead of singing, the boys breach the crowd and beat you up, one by one. Liam holds one of you still by the shoulders and Zayn starts pounding. Harry winds up for a roundhouse kick and you see it coming but don’t flinch or duck for cover. You stand up straight, make yourself an easy target. You feel ribs crack, molars loosen. You’ve never felt better. Louis has one of you in a chokehold, Niall is straddling one of you on the ground, pummeling your face into the stadium floor. When one of you is finished, the boys move on to the next. This isn’t exactly what you came here for, but isn’t it? There’s music, there’s the boys, there’s longing and pain and this crushing fear that you might be so tragically unlucky as to walk out of here unscathed and unchosen. All around you, girls are roaring like lions, pawing closer and closer, flinging themselves at One Direction’s flailing fists, waiting for their own bruises to bloom blue and dropping like slain lambs at their favorite boy’s feet. It takes hours. With every fallen girl, the arena gets quieter. You lay in heaps, blood and spit staining your dresses. The heaps exhale, spent and satisfied. You’re crushed beneath all these other bodies, but in the new quiet, you can hear the boys catch their breath and look around at what they’ve done. They grip hands, all five of them, and bow. They thank you for coming out tonight. You hear them leave the stage, adrenaline pumping, cheeky banter. They’ll do it all again tomorrow, in another city. The music stops. The lights come up. You’re left there.
Imagine Harry Styles is really the character he played in the movie Dunkirk, constantly ruddy and sleepy and homesick. His name is Alex. Alex looks great in his uniform. Alex has mud on his face sometimes, and other times is as golden and smooth as a sandy shore just after the waves retreat. He’s got a mean streak, so you’re always on your best behavior. You write him letters. You teach yourself to knit and you build him a soft, colorful sweater that he’ll wear every day when he’s finally home. You keep the house on the countryside clean for him, in case he’s discharged early and bursts through the door when you least expect him. He sends the beats of songs he’s writing in the barracks in Morse code through the telegraph wires. You knock them out with your knuckles on the wall when you can’t sleep, forming his shape beside you in bed with his pillows. You can’t be together now, but imagine the reunion! Alex unbathed when he kicks the door down with his boot, enemy blood on his hands, laughing victoriously. The two of you still young, just babies with a house and all this want, and he’s just won you a war. There’s joy everywhere, hot and hallowed in the streets. Flags waving. Music.
Imagine you and the real Harry Styles, not Alex, are married in a charming little church in Holmes Chapel, Harry’s hometown. You smoosh cake into each other’s faces, lick up the layers of icing, suck the fillings from his teeth. You honeymoon in a cottage at the peak of a tall, snowcapped mountain. You love each other so much! Sometimes you’re so caught up and busy with all the loving that you forget to sleep and eat or put on clothes or take baths. You’re two smelly, dirty beasts in a cave. Sometimes you fight and you yell so loud you lose your voices. Then you fight in signs, charades, sock puppets in lamplight. Imagine you hang your bedsheet between two trees at the tallest tip of the mountain, and when the stars come out, you project the image of yourselves, the sick starving animals you are, into the sky. You hook your hands at the thumbs, fingers fluttering, the shadow of leaving. Harry’s fingers are two bunny ears, hopping far away from you. But the bird and the bunny always come back to each other by morning, and that’s what makes it beautiful, you think, the way it is unaware of its own limits. The way it never really ends.
Imagine that, married now, you and Harry Styles do everything together. You eat magic mushrooms on a sunny Sunday—Harry Styles loves magic mushrooms!—and lie down in a field of grass. You hate the taste, but Harry teaches you to wash it down with dark chocolate and strawberries. The trees reach their branches around you like spindly skeleton fingers. A patch of moss between your heads is a planet you eclipse together. Your body melts like popsicle juice into Harry’s and the two of you are the prettiest puddle. He sings and his voice is birds, tree bark, time. In the clouds, you see an infinity of Harry, endless always forever Harry. He’s everywhere. He’s inside you! You’re inside him, too. You share a body. You expand and become a beautiful blob, stretched into telophase, and then there are two identical Harrys, rolling around in the dirt. You touch the other Harry’s face and it’s so soft. Flowers bloom in his pores. He laughs and he has hundreds of teeth, each a lightbulb filled and blinking with amber filament. You put your whole head in his mouth and bite off the tip of his tongue. There’s blood all over both your faces, but so much laughter. Laughter everywhere! You roll the tongue tip around in your mouth. You keep it there, very careful not to swallow. It’s like hard candy, a cough drop, a sunbaked silver dollar, a snail secreting a snotty red trail all the way down your throat and into your toes, squirming in the grass. Harry Styles loves you, he loves being alive. He loves music and he loves the moon, appearing like a ghost in the corner of the still blue sky. He feels no pain.
Imagine it’s Harry Styles’ birthday and you spend it with him lying flat on your backs at the bottom of a dark, damp well. You watch frosting pink cherry blossoms flutter and fall above your heads. Through the circular window at the end of the well’s long neck, you watch night come. Seasons change. Passerby poke their heads over the rim to point and photograph and call out to you and Harry Styles, asleep on the cool black stone. Eventually you get cold, hungry, a little bored. You climb back up into the world, but you leave Harry Styles in the well. He says he’ll join you in a while. Just a little longer. One more minute.
Imagine it’s a heat wave in June. Everything’s sun soaked and sticky. You pack a picnic, a bursting bowl of cherries, kiwis, a whole watermelon sliced into a dripping plate of pyramids. You suck the slices down one by one, seeds and all, pink juice drying down your chins. You’re nostalgic for something that hasn’t happened yet. There’s something grainy and fading about Harry, like he’s happening in the past, even when he’s right beside you. Sometimes something like a ghost passes in front of his eyes and he looks, for a second, like he’s Alex from Dunkirk again. Like he’s far from home and almost haunted. He shakes with the memory of something you can’t see, machine gun blasts and bloodstained sand, and you hate when this happens, when Alex shows up in places he’s not supposed to be. You swerve little submarine spoonfuls of fruit into his mouth. You try to lick his face clean but he flickers like a hologram. You miss him before he’s even gone.
Imagine it’s Halloween. Harry Styles knocked you up at a Valentine’s Day party and now you’re a fat pregnant whale, a little Harry in your belly, and he’s stuck with you forever. In the delivery room Harry’s dressed up like a prince and acting like one, too, holding your hand and huffing out your Lamaze breaths, telling you you’re doing great. Imagine the kind of father he’ll be! Never late for pick-up duty, soccer practice, guitar ballads before bed. Your stomach clenches and you can feel the baby punch a hole through its womb, wind your intestines up in its tiny fists, reach up into your ribcage and pop your lungs like balloons. You release it in a rush of blood, mucus, screams. You’re seeing red and Harry Styles, in his prince costume, gathers the child in his arms. Its blood stains the white ruffles of his shirt, his velvet cuffs. Harry coos. Only three nipples! Harry declares, and you’re relieved. Not-as-bad British-Whatever-You-Are genetics. He turns the baby around to face you, and it looks just like you imagined, his green eyes and dimples and your nose and—is that?—two horns, sticking like soft pink nubs out of a tuft of chestnut hair. You scream and try to slink away, off the bed, but the doctor hasn’t cut the cord yet and the horned baby tumbles out of Harry’s arms and into your lap. It opens its toothless mouth to wail, and a forked tongue lashes out at you. You knew it, you think—there’s no way it could have actually been so easy, so wonderful and so right. There had to have been something devilish about your desire all along, something wicked and evil hiding in Harry Styles. Or in you. But look at Harry, helping you back into bed, hushing your baby’s cries, sweet and gentle as could be. There’s not an ounce of bad in him! Look, he’s basically glowing. He’s a prince, even out of costume. So yeah. It’s gotta be you.
Imagine Harry Styles can’t see the horns (or he’s very good at pretending) and together you raise a beautiful baby girl who is not yet as wicked as you are. She learns to talk and walk and everything! When the time comes, Harry even teaches her to drive, windows in the baby blue Benz down as they cruise along the coast. But after all this time the rash on your neck actually didn’t go away. Actually, it’s skin cancer! Stage four melanoma. You’re so glad Harry Styles will be by your side through this uphill battle. You start Chemo and no one can say for sure if you’ll make it, but it’s Harry Styles who shaves your head. You feel the weight of his rings on your scalp, heavy and cool. A sunshine yellow flake of his nail polish chips off and falls into your lap like dandruff. You cry a little, and Harry says you can shave his head, too, if it’ll make you feel better. You run your hands through his hair that you love so much. You rub his grease into a fine, flat salve over your fingerprints and then you mow it all down. His widow’s peak disappears. You always knew he’d be bald someday (bad British genetics), but now here you both are, two hairless aliens in the bathroom, surviving something together. You wonder how you’d have ever done this alone.
Imagine Harry Styles uses a small slice of his fortune (sells one of his several vintage cars, a baggie full of the hair he shaved off with you, a toenail clipping) to fund the research into a tiny pink pill that will cure your cancer once and for all! You’re brand new now, all thanks to Harry. You’ve never felt better. Your daughter’s all grown, wears lots of hats to hide her horns, but is lovely and kind. Imagine a life like this: you and Harry Styles growing gracefully old in a country cottage, tethered together in a white rope hammock, a wraparound porch and a rose garden. When you prick yourself while pruning, Harry Styles swoops in with a Band-Aid and tongues the blood dry. Your hair has grown back, so has his. You hold onto each other. You feel sort of immortal.
Imagine you’re sleeping in one weekend and Harry Styles is in the kitchen making breakfast. He’s sifting snow white sugar onto the tray of pancakes he plans to bring you in bed, but suddenly something feels wrong. He smells sea air, gunpowder. He freezes. Then there’s a hole in the middle of him, a muddy red absence severing his butterfly tattoo’s wing from its thorax. He dips his pretty hands into the wound. Damnit, Harry says. You again. Dunkirk Alex keeps his rifle raised, long after the blast wakes you in the bedroom. He drips sea water, wet globs of sand, onto the kitchen tile. You run to Harry’s side, try to clot his wounds with your wadded up nightgown, but he’s fading fast. You see the picture of your daughter held up with magnets next to the grocery list disappear, too. The sweet little life you’ve built, washing away like boot prints on the beach in Alex’s strange storm. What have you done? You scream at Dunkirk Alex, still trembling by the refrigerator. He doesn’t belong here. You find it hard to look at him straight on, this unstitched mirage, patched shabby and sopping into this place where you don’t want to imagine him. The different images in your brain are rubbing up against themselves, now, the things you want coming out staticky and wrong and all steamed up. You married me first, Alex says, in that war torn way of his that isn’t Harry at all. You can’t have us both.
Imagine the mourning period. You’ve never known loss like this. You worry it won’t ever really end. You have Alex now, of course, and he should be enough, right? He’s still Harry Styles, isn’t he, under all the makeup and the uniform? But his face is all hard lines and hunger. He never really dries off and he doesn’t smell like himself either, like the Harry you loved. He smells like rotting leather. Sometimes, when you miss Harry most, you try to rip Alex’s uniform off, scrub the movie magic makeup off his tattoos, muss the gel and shrapnel out of his hair and find the real Harry somewhere beneath all the layers. But it’s impossible to get him fully naked: you tear off his life vest, his jacket, and new ones materialize under your fingers. There are limits, you realize with something like a punch to the stomach, to what you can imagine of Alex. He’s not really yours, this Harry. You keep crashing into the wall of him. And honestly? He bores you. He doesn’t fit right beside you. You want to swallow him but you can’t fit your jaw around him. He melts like cotton candy in your mouth.
Imagine you live near a little manmade beach and Alex spends his days there, sitting on the shore with his legs outstretched, staring straight ahead through the mist. Every day, the battle has just ended. Every day, his enemies retreat. Every day, he regains his strength and tries to forget the things he’s seen and doesn’t budge until you call him home for dinner. This schedule leaves you with lots of time to think! Whole days you spend imagining yourself away from him. Imagine you study hard and become a mad scientist. Your project: Harry Styles—the other one, the one you love.
Imagine you make a new Harry Styles from scratch by picking up a strand of his hair left behind on the bathroom floor from the head shaving, so long ago, and swirling it around in a glass beaker. A shiny white egg forms. You put the egg in sunlight and wait for it to hatch. A tiny Harry comes out sticky and sleepy and small, spitting up bits of shell, but you bathe him in the sink and soon he’s life sized. You don’t call Alex home, so he stays forever on the beach, occupied with his own imaginings. You watch him out the window and he hardly even moves. Good, Alex. Stay, Alex. You can make as many new Harrys as you want, you realize. Why stop at one? You fill all your furniture with Harrys, then whole rooms, the house. Harrys in the closets, in the bathtub, stacked all the way up to the ceilings, wandering around your backyard like clucking herds of hens. It’s paradise. Your friends don’t come around much anymore, because they can hardly hear themselves think over all the Harrys, precious as ever but perched on the roof like roosters, howling and chirping and carrying on at all hours. Your family says they miss you, the way you were before all the Harrys. They say it’s like you’ve been chewed up. They don’t understand your science, your passion, the multiplicity of your love, the way it takes all these new forms that are bigger, really, than Harry Styles himself. Maybe, at some point, the experiment stops being about the real Harry all together. It’s about something else. But you can’t say what yet. You need to keep experimenting.
Imagine you’re playing Operation and Harry Styles is the game board. Spreading you open is the only way of knowing you, he sings, and you want to prove him right. You strap one of your new Harrys to a long table, rip his clothes off, and cut a little cat door out of his torso, right over the butterfly tattoo. You poke around. His bones rattle and vibrate against your scalpel. He’s screaming out, but you’re being as gentle as you can. You promise you don’t want to hurt him, that you’ll sew him back up real tight once you’ve found what you’re looking for—some answer tucked under his liver, kidney, spleen that might explain. You put your hand over his mouth to mute his panic. You’ll be alright, you tell him. You’re singing.
Imagine you teach all the different Harrys you’ve made how to shapeshift. Imagine one of them is a basket that you carry through a big garden, picking berries and wildflowers. Harry weaves himself into wicker and helps release seeds from their shells with his teeth. He makes a great basket, deep and sturdy, and you can fit all your love inside, keep it safe under a checkered cloth. Imagine one Harry is a megaphone, his open mouth the speaker, his ear the mouthpiece. One day you feel this urge to scream into Megaphone Harry over the clucking of all the other Harrys, over Alex’s flashback screams on the empty beach, the bears and gorillas and sharks, all your dead headless dates, everyone you’ve ever loved but were too disgusted by your bearish goatish self to tell them, and release yourself from this secret you’ve had bubbling up inside you all your life. It isn’t really a secret; just this thing you want to say somehow—something about this hot disgusting ball of want inside you that you didn’t know where else to put, scared it’d burn you alive. Harry is a great Megaphone, loud and patient and clear, and you yell into him that your desire is like a hungry black hole in the night and that he’s really just a spaceship hurdling you towards it. You wonder if, once you and Harry Styles are finally just stardust buried in the belly of some heaven, you won’t be so hungry anymore.
Imagine, eventually, that you begin to wonder what the point of all your Harrys is, what you want from them. What you’re hoping to find or if you’ve found it already. Your data’s all over the place, your hypotheses unwieldy and lost. You stop yourself from making another Harry by cracking your last egg over the stove and frying it up in a hot pad of butter. He’s half fetus, half golden yolk. One of his four nipples swims in the grease, a blinking green eye, the tiny beginnings of his twin swallow tattoos, wings stretched mid-flight, until you scramble them with the tip of your spatula. You eat Harry on toast and all the other Harrys watch, cawing and hooting and hungry. Harry Styles tastes so good! You’re sick and salivating. You eat all of him. You feast until the house is empty. You cough up a nest of Harry hair. It’s so beautiful. It’d make a great wig for the version of Harry that goes bald with you in the bathroom, if only that version were as real and touchable now as this one. You hold the hair up to the light. You imagine starting all over from the beginning.
Imagine you see Harry Styles out walking with his girlfriend. The real Harry! Not Alex, not one of your clones. Harry Edward Styles, born at Alexandra Hospital in Redditch England, first of February, 1994, 12:06 AM. It hurts that, after all you’ve been through together, he hasn’t bothered to get in touch and let you know he isn’t dead after all. And it hurts, like always, that he looks so good. But what hurts the most is the girlfriend: she’s a French model and she’s all leg and lipstick, wicked and bitchy and blonde. God, you wish you were her! You’ve got a girl crush! You want to shave off all her hair and wear it like a wig. You want to bottle her blood and spritz it onto your neck like perfume. You want to swallow her whole, absorb her like vitamins into your bones, burp up what’s left of her all dainty into your cupped hand. In bed with her, Harry will claw at her skin that is really yours. He’ll breathe her in. He won’t even taste the difference.
Imagine that just when you think you’re finally free, the rash returns. It spreads and spreads. It looks like a million bites. Like scabies. Like someone ripped out all your fur and now the follicles are inflamed and furious. And there’s no point to it, really. Not this time. You’re just disgusting.
Imagine you take a stab at life without Harry Styles, but it’s sort of impossible to stop imagining him altogether. You let your mind go blank, and there he is! He’s sitting next to you on the couch. He’s whispering something cheeky in your ear. Or you turn on the TV and onscreen he’s walking you through a tour of his mansion. It’s got a pink front door and great big windows and excellent skyline views and kitchen cabinets. Cabinets! He doesn’t open any of them but for the rest of the day (who are you kidding? For the rest of your life) you imagine the things that could be lining the shelves. Bowls, plates, cups. A pair of tongs. Things he picked out and purchased and touches with his hands. A blender. A potato peeler. So many forks! You see his teacups, his pasta strainer. You see him in his empty house, cooking something, all alone. You see him eat. You see the dishes piling up in his sink. You see him digest, yawn, reach for a glass of water that he pours from a pitcher which came from a tap which came from the city’s water system which came from some reservoir churning somewhere far under the earth. You see him shit. You’re sweating. You turn off the TV but he stays there, in that house, doing things forever. Things you can’t see. Sometimes Harry Styles is more a nightmare than a dream.
Imagine that, finally, you cave. You can’t stay away. You need to see him. Imagine you huddle behind a puckering rope barrier with a small army of girls at the edges of the set for Harry Styles’ new music video. You camp out for days to avoid missing him walk by, and it’s cold and rainy the whole time but on the day he arrives the sun is finally beginning to peek out from behind the clifftops in the foggy distance. The video will involve a harnessed Harry swinging from a helicopter and flying high into the sky, toes tapping against lake water until he’s carried all the way past the trees, the cliffs, the clouds and into some great beyond. He comes out in a cable knit sweater and wool jacket and oh my god he’s a prince, a soldier, a light source, something capable of flight. You and the other girls hold your collective breath and release it together, a steady rumbling roar. Imagine, then, that Harry Styles smiles and waves and you’re apes and earthquakes, stomping your feet and sending shivers through the ground. Harry, we love you! We love you! We love you! You scream it over and over, so loud your voices crack. You watch as Harry is strapped into the harness, ropes dangling in the breeze, the helicopter hovering over your heads. The director yells Action! and Harry is lifted, inch by inch, into the windy space above you. You watch his boots leave the grass, his arms stretch out like wings. Then he’s soaring until he becomes no bigger than a speck, nearing the sun. Soon, you can’t hear his song anymore, or the chop of the helicopter blades. Harry Styles could be a bird. A butterfly. A star. He reaches out his hand and motions to the helicopter captain. Higher, higher, he seems to say. He looks happier up there, so far from you. He disappears behind the clouds and you look to the director for assurance that this was all part of the plan, that Harry will come back down soon, but the director looks worried. The crew lowers their cameras. You live in this limbo, now, where you aren’t sure whether or not there even is a Harry Styles anymore, and it feels the way an apocalypse might. You wait for hours. The crew shares their anxious donuts, coffee, finger sandwiches with you and let you out from behind your barricade. There isn’t much point to it anymore. You let the director, the cameramen, the sound operators curl up in your tents. Harry’s manager weeps. The sun begins to set, and you wonder if it’s all really over, if this is how Harry Styles ends. Suddenly, something’s falling from the sky—fine powder, debris. Scorched strings of sweater, burnt squares of wool. Golden shoe buckles, rings hot as branding irons. Ash settling on your lips like concert confetti. It tastes like your hair steaming between flatiron plates, pork simmering on a stove. Feathers, wax. You swallow the end of Harry Styles. You cough him up. He was your Icarus, and he’s over now. Look what you’ve done.
The last thing you imagine is a bird cage, just like the one tattooed beneath Harry Styles’ left armpit. You imagine you’re out walking in London, New York, Malibu, wherever he is, and you catch Harry Styles in a net. He tries to scramble free, but you lock him in the cage and take him home. You keep the cage in your garage, and Harry Styles looks beautiful against your boxes of Christmas lights, baseball cards, spare tires and fishing line. You take good care of him, but he’s not happy, always moping and bargaining to be released. I’ve got a life out there, he pleads. A family. People I love, and you want to laugh. It’s funny, you think, the way he still seems so convinced of his realness. You know the truth, though, you think, which is that he’s really just this thing you dreamt up. Somewhere to put all this love inside you. Finally, one night, you fall asleep on the garage floor, your back against the cage rails, and Harry Styles frees himself. You’re snoring like a bear cub, happy and honey-fingered. He almost feels sorry for you. For what he’s done to you. He kisses your forehead and you’re mumbling in your sleep. You’re dreaming about wedding cake, wild animals. Submarines swimming in stars.
You imagine two possible endings. In one, Harry Styles spares you. He starts your car and backs slowly out the driveway and you don’t wake up. In the morning, there’s nothing in the cage but an actual bird, come to fill it just in time. You’re sad for a while, but you feed the bird breadcrumbs and teach it to talk in a British accent. Nothing really changes. You still love Harry Styles, and he’s still this invented thing far away from you, beautiful and magic and hardly real. In the other version, you hear the engine start. You fling yourself onto the hood of the car, but he’s locked all the doors, and he’s revving hard. I’m sorry, you see him mouth through the windshield. I’m sorry, but I have to go. You’re thrown onto the pavement, and Harry Styles finishes the job by backing over your body before he peels off into the night. You feels ribs crack. Molars loosen. Blood tangle, sweet and sticky, in your hair. You watch Harry Styles drive away, find his eyes in the rearview mirror, getting smaller and smaller as he disappears. He looks great, you think, even then. God, he’s never looked better.
Erin Sherry is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow. Her work can be found in the Adroit Journal, the Emerson Review, and Groupie Mag.