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She wasn’t sure how she’d gotten here. Sitting alone, tear stained cheeks blotchy and red with swollen eyes and an unanswered snapcall on her phone. Three to be exact. As well as a multitude of sent and unsent messages detailing her tailspin into slight hysteria.
No.
Maybe she does know. Maybe she’s so familiar with running away that even it is starting to look unfamiliar. Maybe she’d let herself hope for too much this time and still chose to run away hoping to find her way to a new end on a road she’d never strayed from. Maybe the ending was inevitable and the only thing unfamiliar was her hope for more. Maybe she’d made too many selfish mistakes and loved a little too recklessly and frightfully that it was too late to turn around and undo the damage she’d caused. Maybe this was something she’d never done before, ask for what she wanted. What she truly wanted.
So no, she’s not really sure how she got here.
-
“I know it’s not healthy-” She starts her confession as if she knew better than how she acted, how she wants to act. Her heart spills open and drains only the bits that won’t completely expose just how pathetic she feels.
It’s agonizing seconds watching those three grey dots loading until her best friend finally sends her reply.
“..yea thats.. That’s not okay but thank you for sharing with me.” The rest of the lengthy message feels like trying to hear something underwater. Quietly, she tries to clean up the spilled shame she’d laid out and salvage what she can of herself.
At the end of the day she’s riddled and stained in a version of herself she never knew existed.
-
Progress doesn’t come in waves or absolutes. It comes in moments.
Naively, she thought her’s had come in just 24hours of her breakdown. Concert high, she can still feel the colored stage lights against her skin and bouncing off the other concert goers as the music hugged her as hard as it could without suffocating the hurt and sadness comfortably nestled in her heart. Still, she kept thinking she was straddling the momentum of her first wave of closure. Not a single word heard and yet she thought she’d found the path to closure, naive.
The air was cool and her heart was still pounding intime with the rhythm in her bones. She slides into her car and lets the slivers of joy she’d felt in a hall full of people permeate every fiber of the night as if the last five days of growing hysteria hadn’t all come to head just the night before.
It was only when she was ready to sleep that the wave broke and the dream vanished just as quickly as it’d started.
“I need time and space like what I gave you. Sorry.”
Heartbroken, all of it’s pieces racing with sadness, she replies back sharp and hurt like a wounded animal lashing out on it’s last legs.
“I don’t think I’ve ever disappeared on you like that.”
Her words are hard and empty and--
“Ok.”
Ok.
She sat and stewed and slowly lost her mind for five days just to receive a two lettered answer.
Ok.
-
It’s been three weeks since that night and she still has yet to ride another wave or uncover another moment.
Naive.
-
Days pass and with each she can’t make a distinction between the time she spends longing and waiting and hoping and carving out pieces of herself to fit whatever can make her appealing again. She spends her time prioritizing work and work friends as if she somehow fits into the mold that she’d been given, that she thought she wanted. Instead she finds herself filling up with time and space, just like what was asked, while her edges bruise with the constant remolding she’s done to fit into the space that clicks just right with a puzzle that she doesn’t recognize.
Sadly, she doesn’t remember disappointment as being something that was asked for as well.
-
In all that time apart she wonders if she’s being thought of as well. If maybe all this distance is hurting just as much on both sides.
(It’s not.)
-
Two weeks later and she’s lost all hope of a happy ending. If happiness has found them in the silence of time then there’s really no question about it. Brokenly, she asks about an old valentine’s present she never got the chance to make some elaborate presentation for. She cries when she thinks of all the hopes she’d had for it, the presentation, the concert, the night, the… well.. The relationship. It was too late for any of that and she knew it. Instead she broke the time and space she’d asked if the tickets still had a home. All she got was,
“Oh wow”
Two weeks of hoping. Two weeks of stupidly hoping that maybe the stars still glittered and the air was still crisp with every sunset. Two weeks and it went from two letters to two words all in two weeks. She hated in twos. Herself and how much she wanted everything she couldn’t have. Both were her fault anyway.
The exchange hurts more than she really anticipated it to. The replies come every other day (when she asks about that, the distance in between, she finds that they just weren’t worth the time. That her heartbreak was.. An eyesore.. A bother. That spilling her heart even at the last moment wasn’t a pretty look. That it was easier to look away from the stained and tainted version of herself than the perfect girl she tried to be.) and after the second day of hoping and waiting to hear something, she accepts that her desperation comes with a clock.
Quietly, naively, she dusts off her pants, crosses her legs, and waits.
If she’s learned anything by now it’s that she’s stupidly holding onto threads that were meant to be torn already. Without shame, she tightens her grip with one hand and wipes her tears with the other.
-
Days pass in twos before she finally breaks again. Desperation leaks into her every word as she asks to hear something. To get the closure she so naively thought she’d found. Her hopes for a moment alone gets diluted into a FaceTime because again, why would it have been worth it? So she settles. Any time is better than distanced time.
Eagerly she calls ready to say something, all the somethings she’d been piling since the first night three weeks ago.
The call comes through and she sees the avoidance and immediately knows there’s nothing left for her here. It only takes a second for her heart to break all over again. (but maybe thats okay. But maybe that would’ve been okay three weeks ago. But maybe it’s just cruel now and like a glutton for pain, she still talks for as long as she can because the smile on her face and the lightness in her chest doesn’t compare to days and days and days without them.)
-
Something that she can’t forget is how she wished she never met him. It’s only a momentary thought but it was enough to prick her in the side and find a home. God, truly she wishes she’d never met him and maybe all this hurt and hope would’ve never walked right into her heart like those shy smiles and that floppy hair.
(It might’ve found a home in the spaces her heartbreak has left her with but she knows it’s not welcome. The moments that came from them were some filled with more magic than she’s had in her whole life. Those moments showed her that maybe love isn’t so scary after all.)
-
Friends.
It’s settled.
She takes it, greedily. She’ll take whatever she’s given, grateful to have been given anything. Like a pig licking the last of it’s meal, starved. She’s happy to have whatever she can get, aware of the problem that lies ahead. Blatantly ignoring it.
-
Now she thinks maybe friends isn’t the best idea.
She thinks that maybe spending her days trying not to be obvious about how much she waits for a text, a DM, a snap, is no way to live her life. That maybe her work life is already sad and bleak enough, her non-existent love life shouldn’t be as well. They are in fact, just friends.
Now she thinks maybe she needs to heal from her hurt and she can’t do that while simultaneously trying to be friends with someone she was half-way in love with.
She thinks that maybe walking away would ruin all her chances at a second chance. She also thinks (knows) that she’s not getting one.
Now she thinks maybe… well maybe she can’t love her way back into someone’s heart.
She thinks maybe having some self-respect could go along way in this whole moving on process. She hasn’t found it yet. (She’s trying though.)
Now she thinks maybe trying to find the eyes of another won’t help her move on like she initially thought. The attention is a nice distraction but when it’s gone, the heartbreak is left to dance alone leaving it’s footprints all over her heart like a ballroom of sorrow.
She thinks maybe her way out of this is probably going to have to be on a road that didn’t lead her here to begin with.
Now all she does is think.
-
Love is scary and maybe she should stop pushing it away at every chance she gets but moments like these.. Can you blame her for not knowing what to do with it?