My Thoughts Keep Me Alive v.2

When I was eleven years old, my mother told me to never cry over a boy. She made me promise. I swore on it, linking my tiny pinky finger with her grown-up one. I managed to keep the promise through a few heartbreaks. Then you happened. I’m trying so hard to keep it together, but it’s so difficult. It was never this difficult before. Maybe this was true love. I still don’t want to cry over you. I keep telling myself that I won’t. Please don’t make me disappoint my mother.

So, I met a boy. I met a boy when he asked to borrow my lighter even though he had one, anyway.

It starts like this: She’s sitting across from you, and you’re watching her like you may never see her again. You study her every detail in hopes of burning the shape of her lips and the curve of her face into your memory, but you know the minute that you look away, she will become a blurred outline of the girl you remembered. It’s like you spent so much time painting this perfect picture of her, and the moment you step away, you plunge the canvas underwater, and the paint rises, and it falls apart. She’s no longer perfect, and who are you kidding? You never were an artist, but like I said, it starts like this: She’s sitting across from you, and you’re sitting across from her, and you can’t help thinking that she could be the next goddamn Picasso, but she would never pick up a brush or even attempt to mold clay into the shape of your jaw or the slope of your nose. You both know that memories fade and the paint will peel, but she’ll forever be a mess of reds and yellows smeared across a blank wall in your mind, and you’ll make her a glorified fucking masterpiece while you’re still an empty sheet of paper with no potential and no desire to be filled. So take a deep breath because it ends like this: You’ll look down at your hands, and they’ll be covered with the colors that she was, and she’ll stand up, and she will walk away from you, and her hands will be clean. And it’s not her fault that she never wanted to paint, and it’s not your fault that you don’t have a damned clue how to hold a brush. Some things just are, and with her, you are not.

“You and me,” she says, “we aren’t eternal.  "However, this moment, this small lapse of time that may be a mistake or may be an act of faith—I honestly do not care which—it’s real. It is heartbeats and stuttered breaths and soft skin and so, so very human. "So fuck forever because I live for the seconds that make up these minutes. I live for the clock striking the hour and the two of us parting ways and knowing that the goodbye won’t destroy us. "Because you and me, we are simple, and we are enough.”

He calls you late at night, and you can’t help holding your breath, waiting for a drunk confession of love, because this must be the time that daydreams become reality. His voice is barely an exhale, but you hear every syllable because that’s how you always listen to him: so very closely. “Can you come pick me up?” It’s slurred, though his voice is just a whisper. He’s drunk, but he isn’t in love. So you slip out of your house, and you start the car, easily agreeing because it’s him. It’s him and it’s him and it’s him, and that is any and every excuse you’ll ever need. Street lights pass in a blur as you get closer and closer to him, and you don’t know why it’s always like this—why does every road and every map lead to this boy? You like to think that it’s fate. Your road ends where it always begins, and you stop in front of a bright house in the dark night, and various bottles and different people are scattered across the lawn, and there he is, walking toward you, and he’s drunk and he’s exhausted and he looks like hell, but it’s him—it’s him and it’s him and it’s him. He gets into the car, and he slumps in the passenger seat, and you want to say something—you want him to say something—but silence swallows you whole as you start the car and pull away from the curb. And you drive, and you drive, and you try to focus on the yellow lines in the center of the road rather than his ragged breathing or your erratic heartbeat, but the lines are blurred and your heart won’t still. Finally, he mumbles something, and you wish that you didn’t hang on to every word he says. You wish that this wasn’t fate’s plan because this is not the ending you’d always dreamed of. You wish that you weren’t listening close enough to hear him say her name, to hear him mumble, “She’s beautiful, and I don’t fucking deserve her, but god, I wish I did.” Because he’s drunk, and he’s in love. He’s just not in love with you.

It’s the devil on your back that stops you from speaking, covers your mouth with its claws. “Everything you say is a joke to them,” it whispers. “No one truly likes you,” it says. It has you running in circles trying to see something that isn’t there because surely every whispered conversation is about the mess that is you. And you’re constantly on trial, and you’re always the judge because nothing you do is right in anyone’s eyes, even your own. You’ll review your own words a thousand times before you speak and a thousand times after, but still they’re wrong, they’re wrong, you’re always wrong. So you’ll sit there, the devil beside you, and you’ll whisper back, “Yes, you’re right.” You’ll lean your head on its shoulder, and you’ll accept it for fact as you say, “I’m the joke that no one laughs with, only at.”

When someone is stabbed, you’re told not to remove the knife. Once it’s removed, everything begins to fall apart. In less than ten minutes, someone could bleed out. She still isn’t sure which of them stuck the blade in her stomach, but she refuses to pull it out. Instead, she embraces it.  “Do you love me,” she asks, still not facing him, “or do you just hate the idea of losing me?” It’s silent, and she does not know how to read this situation. If she turned around, she knows the emotion would be clear on his face because he has always been an open book. For her, he will always be an open book. She doesn’t turn around, though, and she realizes that she doesn’t want to see his face—see the destruction that she’s caused.  He says her name then, and his voice is level; it twists the knife.  He says, “Why do you do this?” He says, “I’m not losing you. You’re running away.” And he says, “I love you—god knows that I love everything about you—but we’re falling apart. You’re tearing us apart.“  Finally, she turns around, and she’s not sure what she expected, but it surely was not this. He’s cold, blank, torn apart and carelessly sewn back together. He is covered in her—covered in her heartbreak. "I need—” He clears his throat, hides any slip of emotion. “I need you to let me go because I don’t have the strength to do it myself.” And at that moment, she realizes this is no longer a game. All this time she thought she was being selfish with her heart, but this boy—This boy makes her wish things were different; he makes her wish that she was different.  That’s why she sucks in a rattling breath, and that’s why she forces those selfless words past her lips. She swallows the pain and tries to cure the heartbreak when she says, “You should leave."  He winces. He looks like he wants to take back his words. He looks like he wants to stay, and he looks like he wants to cross the room in three steps and pull her into his arms and stop her from slipping away like water between his fingers.  Looks, however, have always been deceiving.  He leaves, and he takes the knife with him.