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“You are the silence in between what I thought and what I said”— Florence Welch
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Synthetica, Metric (Acoustic) -
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AMOS: I think the first time I ever saw that effect that Taylor had on people [was when] we were actually out to eat in an Applebee’s, or...
once i was kissed at a weezer concert. somewhere in beverly hills, the sun was still slowly dipping down, but on the east coast it’d already begun raining stars and i felt my heart falling towards the earth right there along with them. i felt his hands grip my waist and move up, too quickly, too scary, getting too dangerous, in a crowd that was so chill no one noticed the two of us getting hot. his heat was that of sexuality, animal desire and lust, and mine was more the burning shame of succumbing to his touches while unable to stop either him or myself. i did have enough sense to take it to his car, but i took my sweater off, lost in his hungry lips. “if you want to destroy my sweater..” i thought, and then immediately after: “i want you to.” but it was untouched, not a single thread unraveled, and i remembered it at the last minute, saving it from the obscurity of his backseat before i met up with my friends post-concert. i knew my face was flushed and my hair was a haystack, but they said nothing, and i looked down at my feet.
once i fell in love at a jimmy eat world concert. we made eye contact from a distance of a dozen fans and he carefully made his way over to me. he stood beside me, talking only during the quiet intervals between songs, and mumbling even then. he had a theory that music was a kind of hypnosis, and that’s why it had such a strong emotional pull, that’s why it could tug at the hem of your weak spots and leave you naked in public. we went on a few dates after that, spaced sporadically apart because he lived so far from me, and it was hard to let myself believe he was real. he could’ve been anyone, anyone can show up like that, anyone can fit snugly into the persona you’ve invented and the soulmate you’ve been waiting for. the last time i saw him, i sipped my coffee hesitantly, marveling at how quickly some things lost their warmth. he held his cigarette between his fingers like he ached to get rid of it immediately after lighting, and i understood. he left behind a mixtape that i tucked into a box and shoved in my closet, somewhere between photographs of a strawberry-filled summer and thoughts of connecting the dots, tracing the freckles on each other’s arms until we had committed our bodies to memory - but i didn’t want to love a body, i had made that mistake before and now i wanted to love a soul.
for a while i loved my own. i treated it to ice cream and challenged it with cynical novels and sad foreign films. i picked up yoga to stretch it, zumba to strengthen it, and running to make it last longer. then i picked up performing my own songs, and that’s what did it. it was ethereal, ephemeral, but as close as i could get to feeling free. until once, when i had my heart broken at my own concert. there was a guy i’d always waited for, someone i had kept in the back of my mind, patiently and privately entertaining the notion that he would weave his way back into my life and lead me into his, like following ariadne’s thread out of the maze of inevitable loneliness. i saw him in the middle of a song, a pretty brunette girl on his shoulders and his arms wrapped around the graceful woman in front of him. i don’t know if you can hear a heart break. i don’t know if you can sense the musician fall apart right there on the stage. i don’t know that if either of those things were true, we’d know, or if we’d just assume it were part of the performance and be moved by how real it seemed. for me though, my world stopped for a minute. my escape, my out, my salvation, had turned its back on me and pushed me to seeing him so happy and so complete without me. i crumbled before the microphone, before hundreds of people who just wanted to sing along with me, before the man i had wanted to love for the rest of my life.
once, in the comfort of my own empty apartment, i gave up on music. i didn’t need the radio, or my old cds, or the mixtapes or records or pages upon pages of words, all of which i threw in the trash. i didn’t need anything. once was more than enough.
don’t think you have me fooled.
you know i’m still here. i can hear you tell your friends, “i threw everything he gave me away,” with your lip bitten to keep yourself from telling them more. i can imagine them squinting their eyes, surveying the room for any signs that you’re lying. when you have them convinced, they drop off the chocolate milkshake and leave.
but i know better. it is very dark and quiet in here, as well as inexplicably uncomfortable; i am constantly being prodded by sequins from the shirt your crazy aunt gave you for your birthday a year ago. everything here smells like shame and abandonment, and the air is thick and muggy with all the emotions you’ve trapped. it’s hard to breathe, but even more difficult to retain his smell. i’m trying for you, though. my sleeves hold tight to his cologne and sweat and tears. i have memories of him sewn into every delicate stitch, which i dutifully protect from moths and other creatures bent on unraveling them.
when their footsteps are long gone, and the tears have stopped rolling down your soft skin, i stay still and patient. it isn’t long before i feel the floor beneath me moving quickly, i am finally freed from those damn pearls or beads or whatever poking my sides, and i glow in the warm light of your bedroom. your fingers grip me much more tightly than they ever have before, though, as you hurriedly slip me over your head. my fabric dries your tears as i fall down, clinging to you – though not in as many places as i was accustomed to before i was yours. it seems you always forget that he was bigger than you; he had those muscles you loved to rest your head against and the strong arms to pull you closer to his body when you were cold, so i do not fit you as snugly as those t-shirts that you are prone to wear can fit you.
i don’t think you mind, except that it makes you lonely. when you lay back on your bed, pressing me into you, i can feel the disappointment in all the empty space between your skin and me. it makes me feel horrible, as if i’ve let you down. then you breathe in the scent of my previous owner, and i am proud to still have the power to make your heart beat like that against me. i am happy when you curl into a ball and cry into your pillow, because you inevitably wipe your moist eyes on my sleeves. you stretch my material over your knees, letting me cover you as much as i can. i will protect you, i promise.
but then you bring my sleeve to your mouth and bite hard, freeing one arm that way and ripping me viciously from the other. i am brushing past your hair too quickly to catch all the tears, and when you ball me up into your small hands and scream, there is not enough of me to completely muffle your sobs. suddenly i am flying across your room. i hit your dresser hard and slide down, back into the drawer in which you’ve kept me hidden for exactly seventy-two days as of today. maybe you don’t know that i know the significance of that number, but it happens to be the exact number of times you wore me in his presence. it is the number that documents how many times his face lit up to see you wearing his sweatshirt, knowing that you are his and he is yours and neither of you are scared to show it. it is the number of times i have felt worthwhile and happy. i can’t help but think that you feel the same way, even if you don’t know the number.
so i am petrified when you stomp over to my hiding place and pick me up as carefully as if i were trash. before i know it, we are standing outside your garage, and i am dangling over your trashcan, and i can feel the battle you must be fighting within yourself. i hear you whisper, “everything,” like now that you’ve told your friends, you are obligated to make it a truth.
but i’m your friend, too. i was what you buried your face in when he talked of letting you see other people before you settled down with him. he was wearing me when you argued with him about something stupid because you didn’t have the courage to argue with him about if he really loved you; you punched me when you pounded your fists uselessly at his chest. we were the united front when you told him you were done with him, when you debated taking me off just to throw me at his dumb, hurt face, when you had to pull over on the drive back home and take me off, but you buckled the seatbelt around me in the passenger seat. if you throw me away, i’ll have to forget all of that. i’ll have to forget how i fit around you and the warmth i feel when you hug him. just because you don’t love him anymore doesn’t mean you can’t still love me.
when i have finally given up and accepted that you need to go through with this, you surprise me by pulling me close to you tenderly. you have a funny look on your face, as if you’ve never seen me before, and i am instantly pricked by pain, but the pricking is replaced by tickling as your hand slips inside me and i am dizzy as you turn me inside out. i can hardly think with my whole world so disoriented, so i focus on your face. your eyes are tearing up again, but i have no time to see why before i am turning once more, my sleeves being pulled outward and your soft fingers massaging out my wrinkles. when i have regained my senses, i am sad to be back in the secret drawer but so pleased that you’ve kept me. i shift around, trying to get comfortable. this time, the poking seems to be coming from inside me. it is a tag that i had never noticed before, for it fits me so nicely, like your hands in his. and written in his clumsy, boyish handwriting is your name, a comma, and i love you
forever.
fell asleep on the bus. i don’t know where i am or where i’m going. my voice is too far gone to ask the driver, and there’s nobody else here besides a pink teddy bear some child must’ve accidentally left behind. i wish i could find him or her and return it. it’s funny how as children, we miss anything and everything that is different about our lives. when we grow up, it gets much easier to discard things, places, even people.
guess that’s what accounts for my current situation. he never said a word about leaving. i didn’t ask, so he didn’t tell. yeah, we were in love, but we were best friends. it was more than that, even, because he was the only person i let inside me – figuratively, like there was a secret zipper running down my back. he pulled me apart and explored all my darkest places and he knew what made me me and i couldn’t get enough of it. i wished he lived inside my head so i didn’t even have to talk to him. i wished he knew what i was thinking before i could mess it up with words.
one of the windows on the bus must be open. how didn’t i notice that? i can feel the wind when it lifts what little hair i saved. i cut most of it off. it was nothing dramatic; i just told the hairdresser that i wanted it short. she told me to close my eyes, but i peeked. i watched big, ugly clumps land on the floor and my chair, and i pretended they were falling from me ripping my hair out. i ended up with a sort of severed pixie cut.
it was so hot when i left tennessee. i remember that, at least. there were no clouds in the sky, but it was still as humid as the air after a heavy summer rain – and sunny, mocking me. it made the spaces between my fingers sweat, and gave my shoulders the pinkish glow of new sunburn. maybe the warmth is what made me so sleepy. my first half-conscious thought before totally waking up was that now my eyes were sweating, too. the skin beneath them was moist and swollen. i had been crying in my sleep.
i lay my head on the back of the seat in front of me, over folded arms. the driver notices and stops the bus. he doesn’t say anything, and i am incapable of doing such a thing, so i just stand up to leave. i remember the teddy bear and pick it up with two fingers, like a used tissue. then i place it in my seat, and i step off the bus.
the air here smells like the city, but i feel like i’m nowhere. the moon is just beginning to fade away, so it must be early morning, which explains the lack of noise or any sound at all. i’m just really sleepy. can i just sleep the rest of my life away?
something moves lightly and quickly against the inside of my pocket. for a second, i hope it’s a butterfly. i pull out my phone instead. one new text message. it’s from trevor. he asks if i’m high, and at first i am unsure of the answer. my fingers fumble over the tiny buttons when i attempt to press ‘reply’, and i end up looking at the previous message. i must have sent him one when i was sleeping.
i don’t know how many girls you fooled before. i don’t know how long it took those girls to realize you weren’t coming back, but i knew it right away, trevor; i woke up and i couldn’t breathe, like you’d stolen not only my heart but my lungs just to guarantee that i couldn’t live without you. i can live without you, trevor, i just really don’t want to. just come back, okay? just hold me and let my organs go back to where they belong.
i feel so weak, reading it. it makes me angry.
no, no i’m not high. i’m pretty low right now, actually, and i wouldn’t mind being eight feet under or so. no, more like eight thousand feet, as far away from you as possible, and where you can never find me, especially when you start to miss me.
my whole body turns red from being so inexplicably mad at him, except for my shoulders, which are still pink. pink like my nails were painted, the first time i met him. pink like my face when he’d say something provocative and i couldn’t keep from blushing. pink like my tongue, like my gums, like my lips, like the kisses he could never get enough of.
pink like the pregnancy test. pink like the clothes and furniture and paint we’d bought for our baby girl.
pink like the faces of our friends, embarrassed when they’d ask how my pregnancy was going. it went, i’d say. it went away. now trevor, too.
and i dream and see and live in pink.
three years ago my best girl friend’s boyfriend cheated on her. she spent the end of the summer locked in her own bedroom, listening to taylor swift and sleeping twice the normal amount. she wouldn’t let anyone see her, and we were pissed off. she needed to know there were still people who loved her and thought her beautiful and wanted her to be happy. but now i’m grateful, because i look at myself in the mirror, horrified by my hollowed eyes and smile that won’t quite fit right, and i mentally thank her for not letting us hurt like that. it amazes me how brave she was, to not only survive something like that but to take him back a few weeks afterwards, and to love him harder than she ever had before.
we gave her hell for it at first - for about a year, actually. we tried setting her up with one of our mutual friends. we tried to catch her boyfriend in the act, provide her with concrete evidence so she couldn’t ignore it anymore. we still don’t know if he has actually changed. we still don’t know if he won’t do it again. we just trust her, and we have faith that she can live through it if it does happen.
i don’t believe that a person who was once a cheater will forever cheat, like i don’t believe a person who is a heartbreaker will forever break hearts. people change, and grow, and learn about themselves. that’s the key to being better: learning. it’s not enough to accept what you did wrong, apologize to everyone over and over, and promise never to do it again. it’s not even enough if you never do it again. it takes more than that, because it will always be a part of you unless you actively change it. you have to find out why you did it.
for her boyfriend, it was out of uncertainty. she kept asking him, as girls would do, how he could know that she was the only one for him. and he kept asking her how she could know she really loved him if he was her first. neither of them had answers. even if they did, neither of them had a way to prove it to the other. he found a way. by compromising their relationship like that, by hurting her so badly, he realized how special they were together, and she proved to him that she would always return to him. i don’t know everything about their relationship, but i know they love each other. i know he’ll listen to her cry on the phone for two hours when she’s freaking out because she thinks she’s lost her charm bracelet. i know she’ll do his online math homework for him when he gets called in to work on a moment’s notice. i know they make each other happy.
for me, i still don’t know what it was. maybe it was uncertainty, and doubting that anything tangible would come out of our relationship. maybe it was insecurity, feeling second best and not pretty enough and not smart enough and just not enough for him in general. but lately i think it was my own fault. i confused fascination with affection, and i confused friendship with something more. i loved the other guy’s culture and the pretty words he’d tell me, and i mistook that for attraction to him. it wasn’t. i wasn’t attracted to him, any more than i was uncertain about our relationship or insecure about myself. but it’s hard to recognize your own motivation when other people are trying to make up your mind for you. it’s hard to tell yourself you did it because you’re unhappy when everyone else is quick to just call you a slut and label you as undeserving and untrustworthy and uncaring.
but it’s easy to change. it’s easy to think hey, even if my hair looks god awful today, i can still make somebody smile or turn someone’s day around. it’s easy to admire a boy’s taiwanese traditions and remind myself that i want to know his culture intimately, not him as a person. and, well, it’s easy to be secure in being single. relationships are hard work when done right; they require attention, and making choices, and thinking always about the other person’s feelings, and being very very honest. single is second nature. single is batting your eyelashes at the dairy queen cashier, and making offhand jokes about an old high school friend being “your man,” and feeling the flutters in your chest when a handsome acquaintance texts you about being better friends.
one year ago i cheated on my best guy friend. i would change it, for all kinds of reasons, if i could. but instead, i’m spending my summer learning how to be better, because i’m not a cheater. even with no one to love, i’m just gonna be a lover.
it’s kind of ridiculous that we have to work our asses off for 13 years in school just to work our asses off for another 2-8+ years in college just to work our asses off in a job that we probably don’t even like, when we were born on this earth without a choice and i for one certainly didn’t sign up for that
this is seriously all i fucking think about
exactly
no, you’re right - i did not sign up for this. but i would if i had the chance. i would sign up for free ice cream scoops in the pouring rain and mariposas landing four inches from your face when you lay in the summer grass. i would sign up for driving around at three in the morning with friends, scared for your life but happy to be alive. i would sign up for the feeling you get when the little girl you’re tutoring finally gets it and she celebrates only by sighing, because she knows when she goes home there is only more work to be done in the house, or the feeling that comes when you watch a documentary that moves you so much it is as if someone standing right next to you just shoved you, making your insides rattle and your heart rearrange to fit a new issue inside that you’re now hell-bent on solving.
none of us simply signed up, that’s why we’re lucky. and if all life is to you is work, you’re not doing it right.
(via loveleeblue)
i’m remembering all those songs you had on your ipod, literally thousands and thousands of songs. most of them you only vaguely knew the lyrics to; you just kinda liked the beat or music or something at one point that made you download the song and it stuck or grew on you or was once your favorite and is now nearly forgotten.
that’s all i’m going to be to you. i’m one of those songs that you listen absentmindedly to, something you can hum along with because you don’t care enough to learn all the words, a song you won’t sing for anyone.
i hope i sound like the very first song you ever sent me – think twice, ralph myerz, from that movie you threatened to make me watch with you but didn’t, a little techno and a lot like lykke li, sent from you with total innocence because you didn’t know i had already fallen for your charm. or maybe the first one you sent me that i absolutely adored and is still one of my favorites today, the one from that romantic comedy we both loved and is highly under-appreciated and made me want to be with you so, so badly, playing the elevator game and learning how to ice-skate with you and dare i say it? falling in love with you to prove the cynics wrong. i didn’t forget that a year later you’d already forgotten that you’d sent it to me. maybe that should have been a sign that you always meant more to me than i meant to you.
there were a lot of songs you sent me. i told you which ones i hated and i told you which ones i thought were beautiful and i instantly liked anything that you told me made you think of me. those were only pretty words though, weren’t they? it was only you sharing your music, not you sharing a piece of you with me.
i’m sorry i made you – and your songs – mean more to me than you intended.
i’ll be okay as long as i learn to keep the sadness out of my eyes.
lindsay told me he wouldn’t want to play me in poker. i don’t think i have a poker face at all but he sure seems to think i do, and he says it’s offset by my eyes. “your eyes do all the talking,” he likes to tell me, which is pretty convenient since i don’t like to talk much.
i wouldn’t know what to say to people anyway.
“he made me believe i deserved the same true love i thought everyone else deserved, and then he took it away”?
“we fell in love when we weren’t supposed to and now even if we’re supposed to be together it’s ruined”?
“i naively thought it would work out if i tried hard enough, but i didn’t realize you’re not supposed to find the person who won’t give up on you; you’re supposed to find the person who doesn’t make you want to give up”?
i wonder if my eyes can contain all those words, if they can showcase the guilt and shame and meaninglessness that now follow me around school and cuddle me in bed.
there are people who can teach you how to control your body to carry out your messages – the art of body language. but no one can teach you how to make your eyes fill with happiness when there is none to be found. no one can teach you to disconnect your heart from your eyes.
i used to be in love with everything i saw, and now everything i see just makes me sad.
on the car ride home my sister said, “oh my gosh don’t you wish you could play a memory like a video so everyone else could see it?”
and i said, “yeah,” but what i really thought was “that’s exactly what writing does.”
he texted and called her for ninety-nine nights without fail, never saying the same thing twice. one night would be “i miss you,” the next might be “don’t you need me?” and the third would likely be “what happened to the forever you promised me?” but she never replied because that would be giving in. if she said anything at all she would say too much, so she kept silent.
on the 100th night she was tired of hearing him hurting. she needed to make him move on, make him stop hurting, make him see he couldn’t have really loved her all along. she made a to-do list and put his best friend at the top followed by the two friends he always said he missed sharing his childhood with, and within a week she’d had all three of them. she started referring to his girl friends as whores and making sure to let anyone with whom she talked know that they were not to be trusted or treated as ladies. she stopped saying hello to his mother and his sister at the grocery store or the tennis courts. she only had to keep up the bitch persona for two more months; then she could go away to college and he could go find someone to love him right. sure enough, he stopped calling, and she would see him in town occasionally with girls but never heard of him having a girlfriend after her.
the night after graduation, he skipped the texts he used to send and went straight to calling her. she considered answering only briefly – before she even had the chance, he’d hung up, this time without leaving a voicemail. she called his best friend out of genuine, uncontrolled concern for him.
“why would he call me? i did so much to make him realize he never cared for me and i never deserved him and yet he still called. why doesn’t he hate me?” she pleaded with him, needing to hear him say what she knew in her heart but was afraid to admit, what had driven her to leave him in the first place, what kept her caring so much about him that she would ruin her reputation to give him an escape route from her love.
“he doesn’t hate you. he’s just confused.” his best friend sounded tired, exhausted, worn out by the girl and the boy who just couldn’t seem to get it right and had given up on trying.
“confused by what? i think i made it pretty clear. it’s over between us. it was never anything.” she kept seeing his face in her head, the way he closed his eyes when she said those words that broke his heart, the way he reached out to hold her in his arms and she pulled away coldly. how different would things have been if she’d succumbed to his embrace once again, if they’d laid together all night in his sheets that smelled like her, if he’d given her the ring that was now rusting in the pocket of his jeans?
“he doesn’t know how to talk to you anymore because he’s afraid it’s his fault you are the way you are. he’s confused because he doesn’t know how he can still be in love with a girl who could do such awful things. and he doesn’t know how he can ever stop.”
she stayed quiet, as she had done every night before.
“he doesn’t want to stop.”
i was sitting in a ben & jerry’s at the airport, mistakenly early by over two hours for my plane back home to see my fiance after spending the summer studying abroad in italy. the ice cream had only consumed about ten minutes. facebook had eaten up much more time, but i still had over forty minutes to wait. i began people watching.
i’d heard that people liked to watch other people – not exactly as a hobby, but as more of a habit. i suspected that we liked to see how others behave to justify our own mannerisms, our own ways of walking and stopping and laughing and recognizing one another. i wasn’t the type for that, though; i readily admit that i’d much rather focus on understanding myself other than others, but these were desperate times of despair and total boredom, even worse than those never-ending family road trips we’d take when i was younger, so i indulged a little.
most of the people were the business type. they walked briskly with their heads held high and their eyes never meeting another’s, not even when it seemed they’d met whoever had been waiting for them. a few were families – happy, loud, children spilling over into other people’s personal spaces. i noticed that the cuter the kids, the less aggravated the victim was when they were bumped into or interrupted.
after about thirty minutes of disengaged viewing, one nicely dressed young man caught my attention. he was standing by a fake christmas tree, checking his watch exactly every two minutes and turning often to catch his reflection in a nearby shop window so he could fix his tie or run his fingers through his honey-colored hair. he was smiling as if he’d been waiting for this moment, but the corners of his mouth wouldn’t quite turn up all the way, like he was nervous for some unknown reason.
i could tell he was in love. he was cute, definitely, with a spark of intelligence in his eyes that is not seldom found in nice guys like him. i decided he was nice after a very little girl walked past him, stopped, then turned around and hugged him. he giggled and patted her head – friendly, a little awkwardly, and genuinely. i liked him from that moment on, and observed him more intently than all the other people hurrying from place to place.
plane after plane landed, and i saw him grow impatient. he began checking his watch even more often, blushing sometimes at something he must’ve privately thought. finally, his eyes lit up and he straightened his back. he was tall and proud, but the signs of anxiety he’d exhibited before were clearly still there in the way he shuffled his feet and checked his phone.
i didn’t see her until a few minutes after he did. his eyes lit up, and those soft lips of his finally turned up into one of the best smiles i’d seen in a while. he wiped his hands on his thighs and took a single step forward, but seemed unable to move any closer towards her.
she was beautiful, she really was, not a model, but not plain by any measure. she wore a pretty navy t-shirt tucked into an off-white skirt with tiny red polka dots, and sweetheart sunglasses atop her head of messy blond curls. i watched her face flush when she saw the man, but she walked confidently towards him. she stopped a couple feet from him, and they smiled at each other.
ah, this is his girl, i realized. she ran into his arms, then, wrapping her arms around his neck, and i imagined him breathing in the smell of her hair as his arms circled her tiny waist. they hugged each other for a long, long time, so tenderly that i averted my gaze to give them privacy. when they finally pulled apart, he pressed his forehead to hers. i waited for them to kiss, expecting it to be as extraordinary as they looked together, but instead their hands found one another’s and their fingers intertwined. it was the perfect image of love and friendship and trust. my mind flashed briefly to the camera in my carry-on bag, but i knew a photograph couldn’t capture the emotions i was witnessing.
she whispered something, then – something that looked an awful lot like i love you. he sighed and kissed her hand before whispering it back. she giggled, obviously making fun of him for some inside joke of theirs before they strolled hand-in-hand to the nearest exit.
i couldn’t help it; they were too cute to not see them off to their happy ending. he held the door open for her, she clumsily curtsied, and they both laughed. i craned my neck to catch a glimpse of the car he’d escorted her into and was shocked to see a sign on the back of their car as they drove away.
just married, i thought it said at first glance, but i was wrong.
it read, just met in real life!
i regret leaving him so much.
at the time, i told him i didn’t know why i was doing it. i don’t know, i screamed at him. i just have to go. i just can’t be here, with you, anymore. when i slammed the front door shut, the sound echoed, and i wonder if the whole world heard his heart break.
i think i am afraid of forever. i’m pretty sure that’s my problem, and that’s why i had to leave you. you wanted me to live with you, marry you, raise a family with you and die by your side. i just want to lay in the grass beside you and close my eyes to everything around us. i want to get so mad at you that i push you and you throw things and i make a mess of you and your house, but the next day we make up and are as good as new. i think i could find that with someone else. i know i will, i just don’t know if i can keep it. how do you keep adding passion to a relationship after the one-year mark, the 6-month mark, hell, even after just two weeks? i get so bored. i get.. i get greedy, maybe. i want things that he is not, and i try to make him be those things by pushing him into them. when he doesn’t like them, when he backs off, that’s when i want him holding me and keeping me warm. i can’t help but wonder if this cycle will haunt my love life forever. can you even call it a love life? i feel like i’ve been looking for a best friend more than a potential husband. someone who can read my mind, but also want to change it. someone who tries new things with me. someone who grows with me, into people we never thought we’d become.
i have a date with him in four days. i think it will be the true test of whether or not i loved him or still can – if we pick up where we left off, we’re right for each other. or maybe he is right for me but i am so wrong for him. i have more faith in the universe than that, though. i don’t know how i’m supposed to act with him. how will he expect me to be? have we changed so much that we can’t sit in comfortable silence? there’s a very tiny, confident part of me that thinks he still loves me. i think i’ve gotten prettier over the past year. i’m smarter and funnier and i’ve seen more movies. he was always criticizing me about my limited knowledge of movies. will i impress him? what if my faults, my shortcomings, were the things that made him fall in love with me? what if they separated me from the other girls in his life, and when i fixed them, i ruined any attraction he might have ever had to me?
i’m still scared of forever, dammit. i’m scared of any time with him. i don’t want him to tell me i’ve changed and so have his feelings for me. i want him to look at me in awe and remember all the fun things we did together before i made him stop. i don’t know why he agreed to meet with me. maybe he just wants to say horrible things to me and even the score and finally move on from our relationship. i hope not, god, i really hope not. i’ve been thinking a lot, and even though i’m terrified, i want him in my life – for a long, long time. if he brought up marriage, i wouldn’t make a face and talk about government conspiracies like i would have in the past. if he mentions giving me my own space in his apartment, i’d take it in a heartbeat. i finally want all that sappy stuff with him. we had sex before, followed by those three words, but i want to make love with him. i want to meet his mom again and promise her i’ll treat her son nicely this time around. i can see it in my head; i can see us really ending up together. he’ll drive me home after our date and we’ll stand shyly in my porch light. i’ll reach out and gently hold his arm to thank him for agreeing to see me, and he’ll smile the smile that first made me fall for him among all those faces on 2nd avenue. and some day, i’ll wake up wearing one of his t-shirts, next to him in his bed, with him playing with my hands like he used to love doing. except his eyes will be fixated on a single finger of mine adorned with the ring he gave me. he’ll know, then, that i’m giving him forever – fearlessly.
