#menwillbemen

10/14/23

I was writing in my diary about how my love for him is like being stuck in purgatory and how each day could either be heaven or hell. I’m stuck waiting for something to bring me out. The point at which either place sounds better than what purgatory feels like. Even Persephone learned to find some beauty in hell. Or so the myth says.

Anyway, the analogy was going swimmingly until a wave of sadness hit me. So I found myself on my laptop because my thoughts were moving faster than I could write. And all I can believe now is that I should give up. I want to believe that he’ll remember the small stuff and that my little faith in him is just a projection of my trust issues. But I was always told to trust my body. Eat when you’re hungry and don’t when you’re not. Listen to your body. If your stomach growls, eat and if it doesn’t don’t partake in vices. So what if my body is telling me that of course he wouldn’t remember the minutiae? My body tells me that I would be an idiot to expect that. It tells me that I’m too ambitious. And she sounds like him too. Like when he tells me my rose-colored perception of romance is unrealistic and harmful. I’ve been fed lies from the media of my childhood and now it would be cruel of me to wish for something better than a man. And yet I need that. I could settle for a man who compliments me on his good days and humbles me on the bad ones. I could live through that but I would not be alive. I would not be the breathing version of myself that needs poetry and orange trees and the fear of falling. I could be in purgatory forever and convince myself that the room isn’t slowly being consumed by flames. It even sounds romantic to burn slowly in the smoke clouds of my own delusions. 

The thing that stops me is my brain, my beautiful brain. She fights for me everyday and tells me that my body knows nothing, that I can keep my dreams, that they should be bigger. In my brain I can picture him, giving me half of his clementine. In my brain, he sends me chapters from his favorite books. He loves my annotations. I love his. It makes me laugh how different they look on the same page. I love us and how we walk downtown with the same pulse. But when I picture him in daydreams, it’s not my partner that I see. That’s what shatters my reality. It’s something that hangs over my head like a glass jar. And tomorrow is another day of purgatory but I feel that glass jar vibrating above me. It craves its first crack just like my body craves the satisfaction of being right. Because most of the time my body is right. And once again, I give in. 

I’m going to leave him one day, but not today because today I love him.