“Loving someone means taking the risk that they might f*ck up your nicely ordered little life.”
— Mark Haddon, A Spot of Bother
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Crying
It worries you when I cry. You think that something must definitely be wrong, but it is quite the opposite. When tears well up in my eyes as I look into yours it is not sadness but relief that hovers there. I feel safe with you, I feel as if I can exhale with you. It is a feeling of survival, that at last I can let my guard down and someone will take care of me. I am used to taking care of people or, if that is not required, creating a facade that indicates I do not require looking after. I feel safe with you, I feel at home with you. I cry because my heart swells, because I feel helpless in my love for you. Because I’m finally safe.
Spontaneous adventures 07/06
He asked me to come so I went. I rushed to Penn Station, caught a train just in time. My heart was beating so fast, I loved this, lived for the adrenaline rush. I’ve never been spontaneous and what is more romantic and exciting than rushing to the train to see my baby. Naomi was mad. I was mad she was mad… I was mad she could taint my feeling of exhuberation towards this night. I don’t think I’ve ever done something so romantic. I’ve dreamed of doing it but never had the guts. Soon I will be in his arms and nothing else will matter.
Remembering
I want to write it all down in case I forget. In case one day when I’m married, perhaps to you, perhaps not, I misremembered to purity of my feelings. I could not bare forgetting exactly how it felt to fall in love with you. I want to remember how romantic I thought it was for me to get the train to see you for the first time. It was a gloomy day but when you’re in love the grey skies seem comforting, as if they’re permitting you to cuddle up with your lover and remain in doors safe from the world. I want to remember your face when you fetched me, your hot hand on my leg in the car. The ease I felt being near you, as if something which had been compressing my lungs had been removed. I want to remember what your tear stained face looked like, felt like, when I told you I loved you. Falling in love with you has been the most beautiful, heart-breaking, overwhelming and intoxicating thing I’ve ever experienced. I don’t want to ever downplay that, for my passion for you to be misremembered as comfort and happiness. Happiness is simple, you are not. My feelings for you are not happiness, they are life-ruining, distracting, brilliant extracy. The kind of thing you can only truly feel in the moment, the kind of this to which nothing will ever truly compare.
I can’t see past you. I used to think that I was logical, that no matter how much I liked a boy, or thought I loved a boy my future was more important. I thought I was reasonable enough to know that my first few loves would probably not be my last, but you are different. I want you with an overwhelming urgency. Not just immediately but indefinitely. I live with a heaviness in my heart at the inevitability of endings. I will have to say goodbye to you many times, one day perhaps forever. Every time i do it feels like an anchor has attatched itself to my innards and is determined to assist in my drowning. I feel as if I’m drowning when I’m not with you, when I’m not touching you. I cannot see past you. My love for you consumes every vision I have of my future now and it’s frightening but it is more frightening to consider you not being there. My mother told me that when you have a baby the world becomes a far more frightening place. So to does it become more frightening when you fall in love. You become acutely aware of all the ways it is possible to loose someone and I have already grieved you through all those potential, imagined losses. Loving someone is grieving them, their inevitable loss.
The things I like
Pistachio ice cream
Being awake and alone at 3am and staring at the lights in the dark
Sunlight
The feeling of skin on skin
Boring books that describe boring peoples days
White cotton shirts
Lacy bras
Floating in the ocean
The smell of salt
Thick white farm bread with butter and apricot jam
Painfully perfect sentences
Your smile
You
I try
I try to think about other boys when you are busy. I try to imagine myself in other hands. I try to flirt with the boys who buy drinks for me. But I can’t. I mean I can conjure up images of other lips but I cannot feel them in my minds eye. I can bat my eyelids across sticky counter tops but my eyes only glisten when I stare at you. You are the only thought I want, the only fantasy that satisfies me. And I miss you. And I want you to go about your business and live your life as it is and be your own person apart from me. But I am also selfish and I want to hold you and smell you and taste you and see your smile. I feel like I’ve been holding my breath for a while now and only when I am snuggled into you will I be able to exhale
What to do
There’s a heaviness in my chest. It weighs down on me, mostly when I am alone or when I see other people holding hands. I used to leave your room flushed and happy, grinning all the way home. Now I leave contemplative, my smile fading slowly as soon as your lips leave mine. I miss you, although it seems odd to miss someone you saw so recently. I miss you as soon as the door closes and I can no longer see me. I don’t know what to do with this heaviness… I just miss you.
Sometimes I don’t want to be myself. I want to escape the heaviness in my head and I want to erase certain things from my memory. But I can’t, not now. If I could go back in time now I would not let myself change a thing. Because I cannot trace the choices that lead me to you. I do not want to be anyone else or change anything about myself because you love me, me now as I am, and i wouldn’t trade that for the world.
Over (m)
I write when I feel passionately but I no longer feel passionately about you. I saw your doppelgänger again in the cafeteria today. I felt nothing. No electric shock, no reflex smile linked to seeing you. My body used to react to seeing you. So this is what it feels like to get over someone. I am not angry anymore, I am not sad, I hope that you are happy but not in the sense that I care about your specific well being. In the sense that I care about people’s general well beings and I hope that people, in general, are happy rather than sad. This is not to say that you didn’t matter. I was paralyzed by you, I remember clearly and hopelessly thinking that I would never forget you, that I would be teathered to you forever. I have not forgotten the pain, deep and achining in my soul. You were the first person I loved that was ripped away from me. And I do think that I loved you, but not in the same way I thought I did. And I don’t want to be preachy, tell you how you were bad for me and how much better he is. I don’t want anything, or need anything. You’re gone. Actually gone. I don’t even have to lie to myself about that anymore. I am happy. And you are gone.