Quoth The Ravens

I know.

I was told.

I ignored this blog for a bit. But it would’ve been nice to have reminders in text of every reason why I should’ve kept moving along without her in my life, in my head. Perhaps I wouldn’t be feeling this way now if I had studied up, but it’s no use belting out that catchy refrain that pops up throughout one’s life, “Shoulda woulda coulda…” My decent singing voice was carried away with the onset of puberty anyway.

It started well enough–the familiar, delightful lightness of heart when I saw her and talked with her and made her laugh. I thought I was happy. Then came the familiar, scary sense of distance, a gaping hole that I willingly pursued her through…getting upended by the anxiety that comes hand in hand with vulnerability that isn’t returned and mistaking that for excitement.

This time, when I realized the end of something that had never really began (again) had arrived, she’d at least not promised me anything she wasn’t capable of. This time when I discovered she’d found a new faraway fantasy paramour, she hadn’t really betrayed me. I was proud of her in a way. She showed she’d learned at least one lesson. But there was still that familiar, terrible hurt.

So far, tears have yet to spill. My eyes are recognizing the absurdity in turning on the waterworks over something that I predicted would happen as soon as the first sign lent suspicion to sharpen their black gaze.

“Nevermore,” they say.

And so from here on out, I look ahead to brighter days.

Can’t Control

I am in love again.

With her.

I don’t know how it is for her, but suffice it to say that I am content with how things are between us lately. We talk every day and recently I’ve started seeking her out after my shift, sitting outside with her in the too-short moments before she has to return to her desk. With my first steps outside the building, I make like I am breezing past everyone, eyes darting everywhere, until I catch sight of her face and I slow down, the corners of my mouth lifting into a smile that is shy in its unfurling, but then shines.

I constantly look up from my screen, losing some of my focus on the tasks at hand, while waiting for her to make her entrance in the minutes before noon arrives. Sometimes she looks back and has a smile and a wave for me. The sight of her strikes a chord in me that comes out as a wistful sigh.

Foolish. I know that’s what some consider me to be. I contemplate that label, too. I know what she did…I could never forget–not just because there’s this entire blog to pay tribute to it. It still plays through in my head, sometimes with even worse imagined scenarios, that I allowed myself to drown in in the days immediately before and after I let loose the torrent of upset that culminated in what was basically “Fuck you, bye.” But as I told her recently, she is more than that. She always was, which is why she never left my head.

I don’t know that this was inevitable. I don’t know that this will lead to what I dream of. I don’t know that this will result in an even more devastating heartbreak.

I used to be scared of that, the “I don’t know.” I always wanted, needed, to know.

Not so much, now.

Here and There, Now and Then

Going out alone was a bad idea.

After contemplating life for a few minutes on a rooftop terrace I ended up at the last place we’d been drunk together. I made myself down a few drinks in rapid succession and tried not to remember how she’d helped finagle my way in past the discerning security with their ID scanners. When my belly was up to the bar I tried not to remember how she’d challenged one of the bartenders to ‘take a shot’ of whipped cream. While I was dancing, evading guys who wanted to put their sweaty paws on me, I tried not to remember the heat we had so easily kindled, in part due to hiding in plain sight from everyone who’d accompanied us. I tried not to let my eyes stray to the exact locations, seemingly spotlighted by the laser show, where we’d been unable to resist each other and stole deep kisses that made me long to drag her into the nearest bathroom stall.

As I sit up in my bed, the ceiling fan giving a slight breeze that stirs the cover of the book next to me, I try not to remember…as I glance at the other side that’s graced with objects instead of her…I try not to remember. Her scent. The feel of her. The way her cries for release took the form of my name and weaved cozy knots around us…knots that I hoped with all my heart wouldn’t be undone.

—

I had quite deliberately, earlier in the evening, done a retracing of paths we’d once taken. The Capitol seemed to eerily loom over me every time I passed it, daring me to commit this deed. And so I did.

This is where I had captured a halo around her hair. Twilight was approaching and we were in that golden hour. I played the images back on my camera display and I fell in love all over again with her casually blinding smile that made the dwindling sunlight tucking itself around her seem as nothing.

This is where a group of us had gathered at one point for my fall shoot for Secondhand Honeymoon. There’s a particular spot in this picture where I had adjusted her bow tie. We were both smiling; there was easy amusement in the air, but all I could think of was how I wanted to take her hand in mine and, with that, say I was hers.

This is where we’d sat down together while the sun gradually sank lower into the sky, and we failed to keep our hands and mouths entirely to ourselves. In between increasingly daring paths our fingers had traced, and lingering looks that signaled fires merely banked, not extinguished; we wondered out loud about the culture of our mutual workplace, where it had all started with an accidental meeting of the eyes and a hello escaping from her first.

We had walked across this landing at the top of the steps; we had faced this direction, seen these same trees. The sky was less vivid then. It wasn’t as sweet.

But she was next to me. The sky needn’t do anything then.

The Distance From Indifference

“Cultural fit.”

A New York Times opinion piece. Compelling.

That was my excuse.

The hesitating hover over the button that would send the link should have been enough to tell me it was a bad idea. But it was just a pleasant heat, full of the promise of a familiar coziness…the sunshine that warmed my bare shoulders while we’d lain on a field of vivid green and were blind to everyone but each other. I was still so far from the flames that had raised blisters on my heart, the wounds I let fill with the putrid, justifiable pus of loathing.

I had lucid dreams for most of the day at work after our chat had ended around 4 A.M. and did my best to avoid sounding like I’d had a shroom omelet for breakfast. Sharks in chamomile tea…tea that I had made? Or someone else? I didn’t know.

I came in looking like a glow stick in a neon-yellow dress. I put a determined focus on distracting myself as the latter half of 11 A.M. approached and then became history. It was a day like any other had been since late December, but I found myself disappointed by that.

—

I said it out loud at 1:38 this morning. I knew what time it was because I had looked at my phone. The wallpaper, a Memorial Day memory, faces of friends–real friends–emerging from between my crusted lashes, behind the groggy blur. People who care. Beautiful, beautiful people…

“No.”

That one syllable, so strong and urgent, left the dry cave of my mouth and dissipated into the muggy darkness.

I flinched as my hair whispered along the back of my neck. The longing–I had felt it.

“No.”

Again. Softer. A tape delay; the word hadn’t sounded until a second after it was formed. It hung in the air. It drew a weapon against the next onslaught.

Her mouth where my tangled curls rested, the same shoulders that absorbed the light, the heat on that bright day when I had everything I wanted.

“No.”

A near-silent pleading, this time. Wishing my hands cupping lush curves, seeing them balled into fists of resistance, resting on sheets that only I had tossed around in this old reverie, nightgown clinging to me like she once did.

“…”

—

Welcome, summer.

 

 

So High (The End)

I want to feel what I felt for her, again. I want to fall into seemingly irrevocable love, again. I want to sit next to someone and feel like I could conquer the world with them, again. I want to bask in a magical aura, a golden glow of mutual fabulousness, with someone, again.

I want to give myself hand cramps and stained skin, spilling my heart into scrawls on paper, again. I want a light to turn on in my heart at the same time as my phone screen, again. I want to dream all day in anticipation of hearing their laugh and cupping their face in my hands, again.

But with someone worthy, this time.

 

 

A Thousand Times, I Closed My Eyes…

I won’t write about what I feel for you. I won’t. Not about the yearning that constricts my heart when your hand is free and I want to cover it with my own. Want to trace the smooth skin spanning the length between your thumb and index, want to write notes to you in your palm with my fingertips, letter by letter, branding you…a lifelong reminder of everything you are to me.

I won’t write about the first kiss. I won’t. Not about the haze in my head that made me say “I would totally make out with you”. Made me move in amidst that crush of humanity cavorting to throbbing beats, illumined by flashing neon lights, to give you a taste of the rum flavoring my mouth. Made a small flame strike up in my heart that I have tried to assign to others because you asked me.

I won’t write about what has been between us for months. I won’t. Not about the walls I didn’t put up because I didn’t want to turn into stone. Not about the confusion that occupied my brain matter and cleared up over the course of weeks, every time your beautifully sad eyes met mine. Not about the time we sat side by side like little dolls on a quiet train and I read about magic. Not about the spell you had cast over me as the long hard winter melted away and spring swept in, sending its first mild greetings. Not about when I turned a year older and we didn’t want to ruin anything, when more wrinkles were added to my sheets and your skin was salted with tears…

 

You asked me not to.

 

Business Not-So-Casual

The other day I got a text from the doctor asking what my weekend looks like. It came much too late. It seemed like he didn’t want the time I did have available, so I said yes to someone else who asked later.

Today I let the doc know I have a Sunday date. He told me to have fun. I wrote, “I expect I will. Ultimately I’d like a relationship that involves more than what you want from me.”

Then things got confusing…he hinted that I didn’t really know what he wanted from me. That got me thinking.

In all the time I’ve known him, he never seemed like the type to engage in meaningless physical intimacy. So when, weeks ago, he started telling me about all the things he wanted to do to me and how much he wanted me, how much I turned him on, I wondered if there might be something more behind it. I didn’t want to think on that too long, remembering how not even a year ago, I would have been ecstatic over the possibility.

Now, today, I was faced with that possibility. And I was annoyed! Annoyed.

He was too. Did I really think he needed to come all the way to my city just for sex? Of course I didn’t know for certain. But he hadn’t talked of doing anything more with me than fucking, so under those circumstances, could I really be expected to think anything else?

“It’s not just that”, he says. So what is it? What is it that you want? I asked him.

He’s not sure.

Goddamn it, doc.

All This Ringing In My Ears

It’s how you know someone’s talking about you, right?

Things have settled with me. I’ve been in a nice little routine. Eventually, amid all this seeming normalcy there is to be a twinge of suspicion that all is not well in the world of relatively fresh singledom. It’s a near-imperceptible gut “feel” that soon becomes too annoying to ignore and then…

The email came a few minutes before noon. “Food” in the subject line. Thinking about it now, the timing should have been the first thing to tip me off.

I obediently went down to the security desk upon my lunch break and took it off their hands. Ooh. Piece of cake. I was mystified, but then delighted, and ultimately disenchanted once my stomach started rebelling at the thought of digesting it. I gave it away; I knew it wouldn’t sit well with me today.

Something else about it was bothersome but I played it off for hours and chalked it up to “Someone out there likes me”. I even made a post about it on Facebook.

Once I figured it out, I wondered why the realization hadn’t come to me sooner. That particular cake wasn’t unfamiliar to me. I’d had it before. I’d given it before, to only one other.

You.

You really couldn’t leave well enough alone.

My mind harked back to that one night in November, the night I should have thrown up my hands and officially declared “I’m done.” The night my addiction to the mere possibility of seeing you overrode a frightening mental trigger. The night you wrote a truth about yourself:

Cruel. Selfish. “Just as she was”–the one you went back to.

That was the night I still loved you despite knowing my inevitable heartbreak was spelled out in that one sentence. The night you didn’t respond when I had said to you, in text visible on each of our glowing screens, to please not leave me here alone.

I said your name.

“Bri, please.”

——–

For two days, silence. Then, words. After words, flowers. Pink and white, exuberant blooms, brightness that stood out so riotously against the drab office. They brought a radiant blush to my cheeks and made my heartbeat skip; in this they were so much like you–your presence, your laughter. Your hand when it enveloped mine, your gaze when it met mine.

I still have them on my coffee table, the flowers. They are long dead. They look like the world outside my windows. Petals and leaves have fallen off and gone largely unnoticed under my feet, pulverized into dust that I don’t sweep up. I haven’t acknowledged them enough to throw them away.

For a brief time I wondered what you did with yours. I wasn’t there the day you got them. They were supposed to be orchids, all of them–white orchids. They were out of orchids that day, and I lacked patience; I wanted to get it over with so I could more quickly forget what I had done. But even so, I wanted you to have no doubt that it was me they came from and that I was still in love with you and that I just wanted you to know what you were to my mind, what you still could have been if you really wanted, but you didn’t want it because you wanted her and for some time now, that’s been a fine thing by me.

Being with you unlocked a part of me I had kept hidden away, that I didn’t know was able to exist for other people.

In the months we had together, and since, I don’t know what I did for you. You don’t seem to have changed much. And that’s okay. Because fuck you.

Fuck you.

 

Me Before B, Especially After C

Yesterday at the bookstore before my meeting, I ran into someone I had met last month and we struck up a conversation. I mentioned I had recently gone through a breakup and something hit me while articulating how it felt being kept as a secret.

It isn’t fair. It wasn’t fair then, it isn’t fair now. She got away with it. She got away with all of it.

I was in love with her and I gave so much of myself. I made the choice to do this, yes. I wanted to do what I could for her. She wanted to keep everything hush-hush. I agreed because of the circumstances and I wanted to protect her on her upward climb…but then I wondered what the point was once we found out that no one would have cared. She said she wasn’t one to put her life “out there”…but then she also said she wanted to tell people about me and what I was to her. I didn’t really know what she wanted, so I went with the flow. Her flow. I never did or said anything I felt she wouldn’t jive with when it came to revealing or even hinting at the true nature of our relationship. She hid me, I hid us. I became her mirror in this. Her reflection, her actions and words, bounced off of me.

A month after the breakup, I am still concerned about being seen as disrespectful if I shine a light on it, even to openly tell my side of things. I am still realizing just how fucked up the whole situation was, how far I let it go, how much I let myself be okay with.

She got everything she wanted. I danced to her tune the whole time and it was only after uttering that one magic word, that so-lovely, so-ugly “S”-word while looking around at all those books stuffed on all those shelves, that I was able to start noticing just how badly my feet ached.

Leavings

Wanting me is easy.

Loving me is not.

This is the reality I’ve had to repeatedly face in relationships. It doesn’t really get less difficult as the years pass, as the pile of discarded lovers mounts.

That reality formed, more than once, the worm that burrowed into my brain, asking “Is there something wrong with me?” I have questioned if I was broken…undeserving of anything more than fleeting passion.

It’s hard to utterly reconcile yourself to the idea that there is nothing wrong with you when on the surface there seems to be evidence to the contrary. All these people who’ve come into your life and then left so abruptly. You wonder what makes it so difficult for them to stay. You forget that the vast majority of relationships fail and sometimes your friends who are so blissfully happy are just lucky, or they may be putting on a facade that hides a life of misery. You forget that there is so much you don’t know about other people, about life, about love, about desire…you focus in on yourself and wonder, “Why me?”

And then you are afraid to go beyond what’s at the top of the pile, what seems so obvious, because you’re scared that it is you and you won’t be able to deal with that. You won’t want to face it; you won’t want to fix it.

Or you would find that it really isn’t you, and that you are going to find whatever you consider to be real, lasting love one day, perhaps even sooner than you think…and that scares you, too.