And all of a sudden the surge of revelation is gone, leaving me with answers I have to figure out how to survive and blind exhaustion.
It was always hiding just around the corner.
…
I kept telling myself I had to choose, like it was one or the other, but I forgot that what you want doesn’t work like that.
The thing you want is always there, and I made up my mind a long time ago, before we even met.
The thing I was ignoring is that the choice doesn’t matter. The whole idea was just a set, a pair of doors that open out behind to the stage, a trick of sleight of hand, a distraction so I didn’t notice myself hiding the truth behind my ear.
See, it’s not about whether I want to be with her or not. It wasn’t the night I sobbed into my steering wheel while listening to her stony silence on the other end of the phone, it wasn’t on that weird winter day when she sat on my bed and finally got to the punchline - I just want to be friends.
…
We talked about it when we were together, and after. Like you’d talk about the weather, or what kind of food you liked.
I was a die-hard, tragic, I’ll-love-you-till-it-kills-me romantic. And she never really believed in love like that. And it’s not that I think she never cared about me, or that we didn’t have our little time in the sun, or any of that.
It’s just that when you get down to it, love is a cliff you have to jump off, and I did. But she was never going to. Love, for her, is just when you’re happy together. So we were, in bits and pieces, until we weren’t.
Because trust is a sacrifice and she was never going to give that up.
…
And here we are, years later, still pretending like maybe there’s something left to salvage. Talking about the past like maybe if we shovel enough shit together we’ll find what we lost somewhere in the muck.
But there’s still walls between us, because I know I can never let mine down, because we’re both standing on that cliff edge and I know if I jump again she won’t follow.
Now the question’s on my lips, and all I have to do is ask, all I have to do is tell her that’s what it’ll take to give us another chance - she has to do what I did, she has to jump first, because the only way this works is if she’s willing to do what it takes to show me I could ever trust her.
But I don’t think she will.
Part of me is still an idiot, part of me believes in miracles, part of me believes that if you give someone enough chances eventually they’ll surprise you and it’ll be worth it, because that’s the person they were all along, and there’s a special kind of nobility in sticking around while they fuck it up until they get it right.
But god help me, I know this girl. And I’ve seen the growing exasperation in her voice, the anger behind her long silences, because she could never show me something that real.
And her version of the us that could work now is co-dependence, comforting each other, making life easier and helping make all the bad things easier.
But even after the ruin it made me, even though I know it’s toxic and ugly and vicious and wrong, I want to jump off cliffs and fall like lightning.
I want something that matters so much it hurts, I want something I need so bad that I’m terrified to lose, I want something worth ignoring sense and breaking the rules for, I want something I can’t stop wanting.
Because that’s the one good thing I remember, that’s the only thing she left with me with, the only piece of us her betrayal didn’t taint.
That feeling of holding hands as we fell into the unknown, terrified but together…
And it’s slipping away, because I know, she was still on the edge, and maybe soon I can finally let go.
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