Cue the scene: you’re in your room, your office, your friend’s house, a party. You tell yourself you’ve stopped counting a number of days it’s been since you've last spoken, but you can see the flashing number in your head anyway and no matter how big or how small, it still hurts you. But life moves on, you need to move on and focus your energy on something else before this drains you.
Your phone vibrates. Your heart stops simultaneously. Your heart betrays you by being hopeful, and you’re ready to toss your phone into a trash can along with your enemy of a heart. But instead, you click your phone on and see who texted you.
Time stops, but you still move. You run to wherever you can for refuge whether it be your work bathroom, your room with all the lights shut off, or some place at the party where you know no one will find you. You hover over your music and click on the album that’s given you strength, turn the volume up to the highest octave.
This is why that text is going to go unanswered.
“I know about what you did, and I wanna scream the truth. She thinks you love the beach, you’re such a damn liar.”
There was a time where learning new things about them was your favorite pastime. You read through the texts and remember the conversations and keep filing new information in the space named after them. You had a special place for them in your heart and in your brain, more in your heart. As much as you hated to admit it but you always thought more with your heart than your reason.
You remember everything, their dislikes and likes. You go to the store and take a Snapchat when you see their favorite candy hoping to make them smile. Sometimes the sky is the same shade of blue you remember was their favorite color. They tell you they hate sushi, and while you know it’s your favorite food, you always opt for pizza. They slowly drip themselves into your life, and it’s weird and it’s terrifying but they can just smile and you just can’t help but be okay with it.
Last night you turned your phone on and scrolled through hoping for a distraction. Your friend raises their eyebrows. “I thought you said they hated sushi, why are they going out to sushi with them?” You shrug, what a damn liar.
“Break the news - you're walking out to be a good man for someone else. Sorry I was never good like you.”
The posts overflow my timelines and dashboards. You post screenshots of texts the two of you have sent each other, and tag them in pictures I thought reminded me of you. My heart feels like it’s about to be flip whenever I turn on my phone. I hover over the mute button, the unfollow button, the block button, but I know I’d rather live a life with you than without you.
“Midnight, lose my mind I know you're feeling it too. Can we keep up with the ruse?”
You remember when the time is just space when you’re together. You look at the clock and somehow morning has turned to night, or night has turned to morning. You know the feeling, your head is spinning and you’re either word vomiting or typing the simplest of words wrong. But somehow, the way their smile illuminates against your eyes keeps you from going to sleep. The smile on their face fills your veins with energy more than any caffeinated beverage can, and you just keep feeling lighter and lighter because of this exhilarating feeling.
But you’re also scared. All high points have their falls, like a roller coaster, it can’t only go up; it has to go down at some point. But you swallow down your fear of the downfall. If you pretend long enough, maybe it’ll never come.
“God I wish I believed you when you told me this was my home, oh oh”
You can’t remember the last time anything felt like a home. Your house was a house, and yet just sitting on their lap or turning your phone on and hearing their voice felt like a warm security blanket. But like in every home, you start to wonder how safe you really are. These are the doubts that wedges a space between the two of you.
Home is where the heart is. You gave them your heart, and yet you didn’t realize that until it was too late.
“Cause in my head (in my head, I do everything right) When you call (when you call, I'll forgive and not fight). Because ours (are the moments I play in the dark) We were wild and fluorescent, come home to my heart.”
There’s a scene in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” where the two main characters sit on a house on the beach that’s falling apart (what a great metaphor for what happened to you). One of them tells the other, “I wish you had stayed.” The house begins to tear apart when the other tells her, “I wish I had stayed.”
Expectations versus reality, sometimes you have a split screen in my head of what could’ve happened and what you wish happened. The way it happens always changes, but the outcome never does. Sometimes it’s all happy, we fight but you always make up and you know almost immediately you never should worry they will wake up and feel differently. Other times it’s nothing but painful, and it hurts and hurts and hurts until you finally realize we can’t live without each other. Those are the ones that feel the most real.
But in the end, you always end up together in your expectations. But you always end up apart in the reality.
“I am my mother’s child, I’ll love you ‘til my breathing stops.”
There’s a poem you remember reading for a class. “I look into a mirror and see how dim my smile is, like my mother’s." You remember crying when your teacher made you explain to the class what you thought it meant. You told them this experience, and how you think you can see how dim your smile is when you look into the mirror, but really you’re sitting across your mother eating dinner in silence. They told you your smile lit up the entire room and you believed them then, now you don’t know how much truth that statement holds anymore.
The music stops. You look at your phone, you haven’t answered yet. You take a deep breath and close your eyes. Sometimes you wonder if you’ll ever be ready to exhale.
