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zayn spends his friday afternoons riding the train home from work three stops too far, studying the people sitting across from him and writing their life stories in his head. he likes how strangers feel, how they intrigue him with their empty eyes and their shy smiles. he understands people most intensely from a distance; from the gaps between rows of bus seats or park benches on a saturday mornings.
some days he thinks he is less of a complete person and more bones and muscle stitched together with untold tales of hundreds of people.
many years ago, in the middle of completing a project on the solar system, he became disillusioned with the whole thing when he found out the moon didn’t emit its own silvery glow (it had always been his favorite sight in the sky in its sharp slivers and ever-changing form).
to this day, if he is being honest, he always feels like the moon. he figures he is reflective: he may not shine on his own but he can bounce back the light from others, and usually that is enough.
and, as if he needs any more proof that he is distinctly lunar, he always finds himself moving opposite the boy who is his sun.
niall shows up at his flat on a monday and throws open the curtains, lets the light shock zayn awake and smiles in neat rows of promise.
“let’s go.”
zayn stumbles from bed with his palm tucked warmly into niall’s and thinks maybe he is ready for a grand adventure.
they are buried an hour deep in silence before zayn even asks where they are headed.
“somewhere else,” niall replies and drums his fingers on the wheel to the song playing softly from the speakers. he turns it up as if to cut off zayn’s questioning and so zayn closes his almond eyes and allows the song to wash over him. he decides it feels like being carried out to sea on a raft the way it builds and fades like lapping waves.
sleep don’t visit so I choke on sun
and the days blur into one
he feels niall’s pulse with his thumb, how his flooded veins beat so strongly and he thinks there is nothing weak inside niall. he is solid in all the ways zayn is paper thin; his laugh is loud enough to rattle zayn’s teeth and he’s painted from bright yellows and deep golds.
the second time zayn asks for directions, niall tells him they are going into the unknown and that if zayn brought a map or a compass he should throw it out because those instruments won’t work where they are headed.
zayn twists his thin fingers into a knot and wishes he didn’t care so much about the details.
my ghosts escaped my head
bar the door, please don’t let them in
with each mile of space between them and home, he feels the darkest parts of himself fluttering out the open window. he imagines the shed pieces being run over by cars, being carried by the wind and dropped into desolate parts of the countryside. good, he thinks, i didn’t need them anyway.
“australia bound,” niall tells zayn when the noon glare burns through the car windows in shafts and heats up their arms and necks. “definitely australia. or else china.”
and zayn figures then that maybe niall doesn’t know where they are going any more than he does, but that he’s just sure that it’s somewhere.
here, beneath my lungs
i feel your thumbs press into my skin again
eventually zayn’s wandering hands find the switch for the center console and he opens it up to peer inside: sunglasses, three breath mints, a guitar pick and a pack of cigarettes.
he knows niall doesn’t smoke because he loves fresh air, and when he folds the lid back he finds a full pack except for one empty spot in the left corner. he runs his finger along the edge of the box. it feels achingly familiar, even though it’s not his preferred brand or anything he can ever remember buying.
“why do you have these?”
niall tells him he should remember and that maybe all the smoke is getting to his brain.
“it’s like this,” niall says after a beat of pause. “i saw a living statue from across the room and i didn’t ever want to be the one to tell him that i couldn’t give him what he wanted.”
of course.
they had met on a rooftop in a party of the city neither of them lived, surrounded by people neither of them really knew. zayn had spent half the party leaning over the edge of the wall wondering what would happen if he dropped a piece of paper over the barrier. he thought he should have never taken a cab all the way downtown when the stars looked more vibrant from his flat anyway.
niall had found comfort in holding a bottle while making jokes to strangers and had caught enough glimpses of zayn to piece them together into an image he couldn’t quite shake.
inside zayn he thought he saw all the things he missed in himself: silence, strings of thoughts hung in delicate paper chains and a smile that meant more than a singular moment of happiness.
he decided he needed to see if zayn’s eyes were golden up close so he jammed the button on the elevator and rode down twelve stories to follow the sidewalk to a corner store he’d passed on the way to the party. with his last crumpled bills, he bought the most expensive pack of cigarettes on the shelf and tried not to run on his way back. it had been years since his heart felt like it pounded sideways.
twenty minutes later when the boy asked him if he had a smoke, he pulled out the box and held it out in offering as if to say what’s mine is yours, and somehow he knew the gesture was less than empty between them.
the boy showed his full neck with an impossibly tilted head as he blew smoke rings that disappeared in the haze of the city lights. he spoke with a voice full of fog when he finally said his name was zayn and that he liked the way niall swayed almost imperceptibly to the music.
“it’s hard to hear up here,” niall said and so they ran down twelve flights of stairs and escaped the city just in time to widen their eyes at shooting stars and have a contest to see who could find the most constellations.
“there’s no dragon constellation,” zayn had insisted, his voice raising as they sat motionless in the middle of a dead silent country road, looking up at the canvas of the universe and talking so little it felt like they’d known each other for years. “i’m serious, that’s complete shit and you don’t get a point for it.”
niall let zayn care a little too deeply about the trivial thing for a few more seconds before he’d leaned over and kissed him, tasting the cigarette he had foolishly bought in hopes of this very moment.
after all this time he knows that zayn still cares too much about little things, that he isn’t as mysterious as he once seemed and that he does have golden flecks splattered throughout his irises. niall knows how zayn only pretends to sleep after he has watched a scary movie and that zayn writes letters to people he loves because he likes to imagine himself enclosing little pieces of his being into envelopes and sending them out to places he can’t actually travel. he loves when zayn hums along with the radio and hates when he is homesick and even niall can’t make him feel like he belongs.
he now knows that zayn doesn’t smoke the brand of cigarette he’d bought that night, but he’d been lucky (or maybe there is no such thing as luck, maybe the details pale in comparison to the fact that they were complete opposites but exactly the right size and shape to fill in the gaps in the other).
zayn puts the cigarettes back into the console and snaps it shut, a faint smile playing around the corners of his lips. he remembers now, clearly recalls seeing niall leaning against the same wall as him, peering down at the cars on the street with the curiosity of a child and the only thing zayn could have thought to ask was whether the boy had a cigarette.
he allows just enough silence to let niall know that he understands, but not too much to drown them.
“where are we going?”
“the south of france. or else the south of africa,” niall lilts and zayn presses his cheek to the window. niall is maddening on days like this but it mostly makes zayn want to kiss the sides of his lips and tell him that he’s the most exciting person he has ever held hands with.
in the evening, they stop by the seaside for an ice cream cone and the setting sun and zayn thinks the day feels like a film reel, spinning on and showing snatches of beautiful images that don’t fully make sense but still evoke the feeling of swollen hearts and crossed fingers.
zayn drives through the night on niall’s instructions to, “keep going straight, unless you feel like turning left, in which case you should turn right,” and zayn takes one left and purposely ignores street names so he can pretend he’s properly lost.
it takes three days of switching off driving shifts, of tumbling out to stretch stiff legs and stealing kisses against the hood of the car for zayn to know for certain that he won’t ask about their destination again. he realizes suddenly from the passenger seat that the lines at the corners of niall’s eyes showing all the times he has laughed are infinitely more important than the lines on a map; that the feeling of possibility overshadows the joy of arriving at any particular destination. they are free in their love and in their footsteps and the feeling of being in motion is enough to keep them driving over the next hill, across the next highway.
as zayn stretches his fingers toward the sky out of the square of the sunroof and wiggles them through the rushing air, niall looks over and asks, “so, where are we going?”
zayn points up at the crescent moon hovering directly in front of them and watches niall’s silver-bathed face crack into a smile that could rival the sun.