The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
- Virgina Woolf
It’s like a bad dream that I won’t wake up from. I keep expecting to open my heavy eyelids and see something other than the walls and ceilings and empty skies that I’ve been searching for the answer to the aching call inside my chest where you once were. In my mind I keep asking the same question: Why? How could you do this?
Didn’t you say you loved me?
Didn’t you say that I made you happy? That I was beautiful? That you wanted me to be yours? Then why wasn’t I enough for you? What did I do to be so inadequate that you had to go off and do that with another girl?
No. I didn’t do anything. I have to remind myself: none of this is my fault. This is the fault of two people, whom I trusted, that completely disregarded my feelings.
I have to remind myself that their actions reflect how easily influenced they are. I should feel sorry for them, right? To be so weak-willed, it must be a vice! But all the same, all I can think of is the way my chest suddenly felt like it was caving in and how I wanted to badly just to sink to my knees and moan and groan with the unfairness of the cracks spreading across my surface. A pathetic show, really. I would rather have a bone sticking out of my leg – now that’s something to cry about! But this invisible pain? It has no cause, no reason. A doctor couldn’t give me an x-ray and put a cast around the broken parts, because in all honesty: nothing’s broken.
Nothing you can see, anyways.
My trust in you, which was already so fragile, is shattered. I’m pretty sure you can find it in the ‘discard’ pile, mixed in with the shards of me that used to make up my belief in love and faith in second chances. Then again, you didn’t just get a second chance, did you? You had quite a few more chances than that. This one, however, was special because it was your last. Didn’t I tell you? One wrong move and we were done? Did it even mean anything to you?
Do you know how hard it was to open myself up to you again, even with all of your pleading?
Do you know how much it hurts to know that everything everyone said about you was true?
Do you know how difficult it is for me to get myself to understand what you’ve done?
I know I will laugh again. I know I will love again. Someday you’ll just be a sentence in my memoirs, something like: “She got her heart broken by foolish boys, but rose above the disturbance of adolescent hormones and persevered!” I’ll roll my eyes about it later and comment with my friends about how absolutely stupid I had been to ever believe that you could change for the better. After all, once a horn dog, always a horn dog!
You just couldn’t keep out of her pants, could you?
It’s not as if you’re the only one to blame, either, so don’t think that I only blame you. “It takes two to tango” is an appropriate saying for this. She knew. You knew. You both knew. Obviously, in this particular situation, you instigated, but she could have refused. Somehow you both end up doing intimate things that aren’t quite the hanky-panky but not far off, and I don’t care if you were thinking about me the entire time or even saying my name instead of hers. There’s no excuse. For either of you.
I’m left with empty hands and an empty stomach. Wondering how I got this attached without realizing it. Trying to figure out where I left my common sense when this all started. I’m already forgetful enough – I don’t need your smooth words and your handsome face to try and make me forget more. All I need to forget now is you.
You. Your eyes. (Not to be weird, but eyes are always a selling point for me, and yours are gorgeous). Your laugh. The way you were nervous during that first phone call, asking questions about the future with this unsure tone like you were unsure as to whether or not I would want you around. I don’t even think I can describe how much I wanted you there with me at that second, just so I could see your face. Something about the way I imagined you blushing just a little bit was so endearing that I thought, I thought, that perhaps the doubts I had been holding about us were wrong. That your words were true for once, and that you had changed.
I can’t forgive this. I want to – so badly – but I can’t. There’s no coming back from a betrayal this deep, not with how we were before. I’m tired of this constant back and forth. I refuse to wait for you to come back just so you can go around and screw with other girls when I can’t see.
Don’t you know how much torture that was for me? Not knowing whether or not you were with someone else while I was turning down others? The worry and the waiting, the not knowing.
I wonder if she’ll tell you that she let your little secret slip. I almost wish she does, but I also wish she doesn’t. The sadistic, sick side of me wants to watch you grovel and beg for me (like that would happen) on your hands and knees. It wants you to apologize every morning when you wake up and every night before you go to sleep, every other text message, before every kiss; that side would take you back for the sole purpose of torturing you with the repercussions of this mistake.
(Do you even think of it as a mistake?)
A softer side of me just wants to be done. She wants to send a simple text and end it: “She told me what you two did. I’m sorry, but this was the last chance you had. You told me you were mine and I said I was yours and that meant we were together even if we weren’t officially official.
Will that be your excuse? That we weren’t dating?
We might as well have been.
You told me you loved me.
It’s people like you that kill the meaning of love. It’s why I never send it over a text, or say it without thinking about how I feel first, and for a long time.
But even with all of this… I still miss you. I still think about your arms wrapping around me and the clumsy, awkward kiss we shared in the dark and snow. With you in your t-shirt and basketball shorts (psycho) and me in my sweatpants and hoodie – it was freaking cold! How I grabbed your hand and tried to sneak up on my friends as they tried to take a peek at our stolen moment. Even though it was cold, and awkward, and our teeth bumped I still loved every second of it. I couldn’t wait to get better at it – with you. To kiss you until our lips were swollen and tired. To have to have that awkward conversation about boundaries. I wanted everything.
Now I want nothing. Not with you. Not with anyone else. All I want to do is get out of this stupid town and escape somewhere else where I can forget that a version of myself ever existed here.