by Emi Grant
Right there on the family computer in the basement where anybody could’ve walked in, I was changed forever. On that big, boxy Mac, its glistening screen, and a mouse smooth to the touch. Tumblr.com. It was so new, like the Hollywood sign, up in lights for the first time. I had unlocked a secret world.
I’ve got the picture carved into my mind like hieroglyphics in an ancient pyramid. It’s a classic 2000s room barely illuminated by a standing Target lamp with a single bulb. He’s lying on his stomach, his face obscured but I would know that blonde coiffed hair anywhere. He’s stripped down to his underwear (tighty whities). His ass is perfectly round and his skin so supple that it looks brand new. Niall Horan, you have changed my life.
I love him so much that it fills my stomach with dread. I am so intangibly, existentially nervous that I want to slither into a hole and die, I can hardly contain the ball of static pulsating inside of me. My hands are shaking and I am a helpless puddle of adoration. I feel my humanity oozing from my body like goo. I want to tattoo this picture on the inside of my eyelids and close my eyes all day so it’s all I have to look at; I don’t care what or who I bump into. I want to rip off my skin and give it to him like a present. Perhaps the image of my raw and bleeding corpse would be enough to cement me in his memory.
I love him so much that I wish we had grown up together, spent every second together. I curse each of the six years that separate us in age and my ancestors who moved out of the fatherland to try and create a better, less famine-filled life for us. I curse his mother, his father, his stepfather, and all of his friends at school, anybody who rubbed shoulders with him at the checkout line in the grocery store. I wish we were twins conjoined at the head and the heart and every single other limb so when he bleeds, I do too.
I love him so much that I wish he was a cowboy and I was a horse and we were in the wild, wild west together. I know the sound of his Irish accent would transcend all logic and I would be able to speak because I must be permitted to confess my devotion to him. I would gallop into the sunset, and collect bounty on the most seedy, evil criminals in the saloon. He would pull out his guns and I would watch in awe as he shoots them into the sky. As he tugs on my reigns, I know it’s a sign that he and I are connected, we are different than other cowboys and their steeds. And then, one day, I would be shot dead between the eyes. He would crumble over my large horse body and sob so loud and so completely that, just as the sun reached the top of the sky, he would die too.
I love him so much that I imagine him as a data analytics specialist for a medium-sized company and I am a smooth seashell he found in Nantucket as a teenager. Sometimes he pulls me from his pocket and rubs his thumb and index finger over my tiny ridges. It’s our secret language. He thinks back to that trip, even though his mother and father admitted that they were in a loveless marriage, he can’t help but think of it fondly. It’s where he found me, after all.
I open up another tab on the browser. Listen to my shaking fingers clack clack clack away at the keys.
Niall Horan AU – Wild, Wild West
Chapter One…
Emi Grant is a second-year MFA student at the New School pursuing her degree in creative nonfiction writing. She is a passionate movie lover and is particularly interested in horror and genre works. She hopes to one day write about pop culture full-time.
