For almost four years, which for someone my age is about a quarter of a lifetime, I was in love with you. It wasn’t the love I’ve accepted before, like the memory puppet or the contracts of family. The love I never managed to catch. The love that I lost along the way, like keys in a couch, or a hand in a crowd. It exists, on the verge of undefinable, and I’ve let it slip away once. I didn’t want to let it do that again.
And I really thought I loved you. I thought that that sort of dazzling happiness couldn’t be overshadowed by a thing in the world. Every moment reminded me of the first time I visited Los Angeles when I was six. My parents dragged me up the hills at twilight, and we watched a million lives purr and pass in the glare and gleam of Metropolis. There was no way to know everyone I could see below, but I reached out, thinking that if my hand passed over them, I could maybe begin to fathom all the life stuck in my cuticles. Every moment reminded me of the first time I saw fireflies in the swampy undergrove of southern France, where I was busy trying to touch one—to caress it, to let it know of its beauty, never to grasp it with my hands, never thinking I was worthy of holding something so lovely. My cousin and my brother were screaming about ticks; I still mourn for them because they never saw those small punctures of light like I did. Every moment reminded me of the time I sat on a ski lift in the middle of a blizzard, eleven years old and cold, when my mom was screaming into her phone about the safest way to get off. Her chatter didn’t break the spell. I was dangling in the air, white marble beneath my skis. Frost whipped my face, held its breath on my lashes, and my world was made of woven, white cotton; I had to remind myself I wasn’t flying. I turned to my mother, my cheeks raw and pink, my fingers numb and stiff, yet I still asked, “What’s the rush?”
In those four years of knowing you, my heart was so, so heavy with happiness it felt like it would’ve dropped out of my chest and rolled, dense and smooth like a pearl into your cupped hands. If I was more courageous, I would’ve pushed your fingers over it until it was yours truly, steadily. Every bit of the world that had me mesmerized still wouldn’t hold a candle to this. I would’ve looked you in your eyes and forced all the sincerity I possibly could have mustered. I love you.
I wanted you to claw for my heart the same way I did for yours. I wanted you to claw for me the same way I’ve been clawing to the surface my whole life, the unending chase to feel alive for once, to feel the water kiss my fingers but always flit away.
Oh, but it’s all horse shit now, you know.
For almost four years, which for someone my age is about a quarter of a lifetime, I was deluded into thinking I was in love with you. Everything you did made me feel; but at that point in my life, I hadn’t felt enough. You beguiled me into believing that every tug was for the space between your arms–for a hug, I thought. Or to choke me, now that I think.
You always failed to understand certain things about me that I found to be the principles of my soul. In many ways, it was my fault–rather the silence of my faults, that pearl that splintered all the rungs of the ladder that led me up to your greatness. But you know that I am deathly afraid of everything human, and the only script I ever grew up with was that of The Pleasant Pacifist. You didn’t need to search for my bruises to find them; every tender thistle was flayed without you even knowing. And I couldn’t bring myself to say anything, much less scream.
You always had such shallow opinions on things. You never graduated from digging with a kid’s plastic spoon when everyone else was taking a proper shovel to the sand. Always looked deceptively collected; did you ever know I hate liars like you? I didn’t say anything when you said you “don’t do politics” because what kind of privilege even is that? You never read the lyrics of songs. You don’t like serious movies. You don’t like nice people. You don’t care about empathy. Well, how could you? You never had any!
Oh, but how I adored you. I didn’t need religion to give me the concept of being born a sinner–I was long ago convinced that I was a tarry thing, and every single one of your tugs was wrestling me upwards, into goodness. You convinced me. I practically gave you the apron and the knife to butcher off my sins, and you managed to cut through sinew instead.
But it isn’t your fault, not fully. And I wish you could even begin to understand how much more at ease I would feel if it was.
I thought love was all in the shoulders. Hunched, preparing for the moment you will lunge at my neck; love was my breath being taken away, but then my mind, and my soul, still absolutely foreign to you. Love and fear, as far as I knew, were the same obsessive loop, the same hunt, the same scars. You gave me that alertness. That constant need to please, the hunt to make you happy at whatever cost. My mind was filled up to my chin with you. But not the lips. And I’m glad I never used them to say anything as awful and cursed as I love you.
Author Notes: reworking of the piece "a breath (demo)".
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United States • 18 years old