Eris doesn't respond, for a long, heavy moment- so long that she almost speaks again.

But then-

"I'm- glad, that you can see this as a lesson." No malice, no anger, just the edges of disdain. Her voice doesn't waver. Doesn't raise.

"But right now? Right now it's not in the past. It's not a neatly packaged life lesson.

(and oftentimes it feels like the answer is yes.)

and it always made me furious- and it still does. but heres the thing, heres the thing that didnt fully sink in until this year.

it doesnt fully matter, not really that I think friendships and platonic relationships need to be equally as important as romantic ones. no matter how much i believe it, no matter that i will die on this hill, furious and shouting. it doesnt matter if i believe it, because at the end of the day, very few people believe the same.

it doesnt matter what i believe, because other people dont. other people will always put their romantic relationships first and will always be seeking out The One, and every person i get overly attached to will have that caveat built in. And the only way I get the assurance that this isnt a danger is if they are My One, and i hate it, and i hate it. i hate that the only way to promise i wont lose out to a romantic relationship is to be the one in the romantic relationship and I hate that these days, these days i feel so isolated and cut off that i want to just do that. i want to stupidly date and sink my whole world into one person who i barely know and be surprised when they arent who i expect. i want to be stupid and full of emotions and not constantly biting my tongue when i lose people, unable to complain because

"what, did i expect them to choose me over someone they Love?"

i hate that im losing people, and im furious that i hate that, because im not. im not really. its not a mattter of losing out or competition, except it is, and until Im properly dating someone I dont even get to be angry about it.

"im so tired of loving people."

She doesn't respond.

"it used to be one of my best qualities- the way I loved intensely and fiercely and the way it all raged through and that was why I could write about it and daydream and /live/ off of the sensation, even when it wasn't reciprocated.

but you can only give more than you take for so long."

She shifts, fractionally.

"im so tired, of loving people, because its never worth it."

"trite." She says finally, but im shaking my head furiously.

"no, no no. I dont mean romantically and thats the fucking point. I loved people with everything I had. Every time. And it never meant anything to anyone because I wasn't /in/ love and at the end of the day that was the only thing that mattered. I loved people and loved people and loved people and it never fucking mattered because I wasn't in love with people.

I burned to a crisp with everything I felt and people brushed it off as inconsequential and insignificant because it wasn't like I was /in/ love.

Im just;

im so tired. Im so tired of it."

She doesnt react.

"even she- even /she/. Said she got it. I thought she did. I really did. I didn't understand why it hurt so much when it felt like my insides were pouring out and she was staring off into the distance. But of course it did. Because she said she loved me and she /meant/ it and that- that real love-

That was /nothing/ it was piddling and halfhearted and weak and I was fucking /bleeding out/ and she loved me she really did so why was I loving with everything I had when clearly it didn't fucking /matter/-

Why did I bother fully, truly, loving anyone if everyone only counted being in love?

Why did I bother? Why did I bother?"

I breathe deep. Wipe my eyes with firm hands.

"i miss loving people. I really do. But its not worth it. It never was. Stupid that it took me this long to figure out, right?

People don't use up their love on you unless they're in love."

She isn't even pretending to listen.

Words rain on deaf ears.

"I was so stupid. I was so stupid.

I'm so, so tired."

I crumple.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

"The world isn't ending, you know."

You are lying on solid ground, still ground but you feel like you're slipping away anyhow. Perfectly still in stagnant air and some part of you still feels like its grabbing at a cliffs edge, nails scrabbling at unforgiving stone.

You squeeze your eyes shut, press your palms against a steady floor, trying to imprint the sensation into your mind.

"it feels like it."

Everything is fine, everything is /fine/ except that its not. The air is heavy and still and none of it is going into your lungs and the sky is empty and expansive and nothing is stopping you from tumbling into it, head over heels with the warm solid concrete crumbling beneath your fingertips-

(sometimes she feels like her lungs are made of wet tissue, crumpled and sopping and stretched and breaking).

She is prone to breakdowns, fits, moments of being pulled under so she is good at pulling herself up- good at pulling herself out- 

good at breathing, breathing, breathing through the water.

She is lucky lucky lucky in a way most people will never know, in a way she’s never going to be able to brag about. She is lucky and lucky and lucky and sometimes she feels like she is little else,

(other than undeserving of the luck, tossed up and rained down at her feet).

She is good at being herself but its not that, its not good at being herself, its bad at being anyone else. She was just lucky again, never had people pushing hard enough to push that unchangeable self out of line.

she could never be anyone else other than herself and through some goddamn miracle (hers, as always) no one really ever asked her to be.

“I have lost it” she says urgently and no one knows what she means. “I don’t have it anymore” and she wishes she knew too. because what did she lose? her mind, her straight back, the smoothness in her words, the people who were supposed to love her steadily and unchangingly who change anyway because the world has too many things in it to account for a girl, lost.

what did she lose?

what didn’t she lose? she’s hopeless sometimes and it hurts more often than it doesn’t. She smiles at people and knows her chest will rise up and gnaw at her no matter what she manages to do, that she will clench her fist over and over in the aftermath thinking across everything she could and couldn’t have done. what doesn’t she lose? she isn’t sure, sometimes, she holds onto what she wants until she doesn’t want it anymore (and still manages to feel the sting of loss when it fades). 

what doesn’t she lose? what she writes down, she hopes, what is put down in pen and paper while its real because she has a bad tendency to lose the things she holds onto, so better to place them down, let something else do the carrying. its not real, its not real, but sometimes she wants it to be more than she wants to be okay again. 

what doesn’t she lose?

“so much of yourself would be missing, though”

“but I wouldn’t know it.”

- paraphrased from a series of conversations about thinking too deep, too often.

For a long time, I took an inane joy in convincing people of erroneous things. Some lies are easy to conceal without ever telling; implications here and there, some bold untruths sprinkled in. Some stories can be told in words unsaid, with half smiles and childlish grins and that stupid head tilt and faux confusion- faux confusion always worked wonders.

-its not my fault I can’t lie!

And now, now I find myself surrounded by individuals who took my lies at face values and believe them so strongly that it becomes impossible to remember otherwise.

For all that could be said about my friend group- even with the drama that happened and the general coldness that drifted about and the pseudo factions- they had a talent for believing the better, of me. Maybe its because self deprecation and “humility” was everyone’s second language, as the children of eastern culture. maybe it’s because they never had to deal with the actual evidence of failure, over and over, and my solid, unwavering words, day and night and in every condition imaginable. 

i dunno why you guys think I keep secrets, I honestly don’t think that hard.

maybe because in high school i still had the quietness in me; the soft and easy sort of love and the overwhelming desire to be loved that made it so easy to quiet down, to listen, to empathize with big eyes and quiet words of affirmation.

maybe its because over time i’d hardened the external act too much and scraped out the inner layers to make room for the lies.

(-and there’s that fear again. the fear that the perception changed because i changed and I don’t know how to get it back.)

I made so many jokes about constructing myself out of the gaze of other people. out of the sense of amorphism and the way I would read and morph and read and morph with a detached sort of glee.

And then I found myself in the gaze of someone who didn’t actually like the girl that got built.

and I can’t tear myself out of the gaze long enough to rebuild.

The world places a lot of value in resilience; in the ability to weather the storm, in the ability to stand strong and take the hits and  keep moving, keep moving, keep moving---

So you placed a lot of value in resilience, in silent strength and sturdiness and reliability.

But for all your efforts, you were never strong. Not really.

You worked hard, very hard, to give off impressions of unwavering steadiness in your own definition, a sort of comfortable unease and steady imbalance. 

The truth was, however, that you weren’t good at holding yourself together. not even remotely.

but you had a lot of practice stitching yourself back together.

These days, more than others, you envy the ones with the stability to keep themselves together. The ones with the iron cores and the solid ground that might get shaken but never shatter. You mimicked and aped as best you could, but at the end of the day you always crumpled. and even your talents in gluing yourself back together weren’t always enough.

You were old acquaintances with the sensation of failure. With the burning sense of shame and the way your breath gets crushed out of your lungs in one fell swoop. You were in pieces more frequently than you weren’t, these days, and sometimes it felt like you spent more time rebuilding than you did breathing. Your best advice was always that life goes on even when the worst happens because the “worst” happened too fucking much, for you. Sometimes you thought about how you only knew how to rebuild because you never learned how to endure.

Sometimes, the shame breaks you down all over again.

You tug at your stitches with angry abandon because after a while you got used ot being in pieces. got used to the sense of disconnect and disjoint and so you started breaking easier and easier but your rebuilding got sloppier and sloppier and one day you paused in the midst of your rubble and realized you might have lost something important, something vital.

like rebuilding a puzzle with bigger chunks missing each time; corners jammed into places they don’t belong in a childish attempt to make things work; a picture reworked and redone and remade and mutilated beyond all recognition.

like a shameful parody of yourself, except you don’t know how to get the real thing back.

your best advice comes when everyone else is at their worst, because you never learned how to be better.