#80 old feeling, old foe

we always walked a very thin line

You always let me write about you, but I never asked for nor needed your permission. I was a writer and you knew that. They all do, but some find it harder to digest their own crimes spelt out in my honest print than others. Not you. You never said anything about it except that I was great at wielding words, and you loved me.

In the back room of my evergreen memory, I saved moments that it hurt to articulate when they’d just happened. Now time has sewn up my sensitivities, and I’m out of my straitjacket, travelling through the years and able to ponder without backtracking. Digging into the bullet hole is anti-advice, especially when we’ll never amount to anything permanent. I won’t even respond to your text from last week. I won’t pick up if you call. I won’t speak if you stop to greet me in the street. I won’t even wish you on your birthday.

There’s just our long standing history. Your blatant lies, my blind hope. Your half assed apologies, my inexhaustible anger. Our love that dwindled and rekindled and eventually burnt to nothing. I still wonder sometimes, who lit the flame. You still send long paragraphs and they pile up like stale flowers in the graveyard of our chat history. I still hear Exile and come to the page to say something.

There’s no use painting us like a romantic movie when we were a burning house. Love fades, but memory persists. To expel memory, I must hold as many exorcisms as is necessary, until there is nothing left to cleanse :

In your apartment, we lounged with limbs touching, Ted Lasso playing on the TV. A Sunday afternoon wasted just how I like it. I was a Caesar salad eating freak who flinched when you tried to wrap your mouth around the bite on the fork in my hand, and offered it to you by its end instead, stubborn denial even in the intimacy of something as simple as feeding a human being who had known me in many more private ways than sharing a meal.

I drank myself blind on mojitos on a summer evening and hugged my knees next to the swimming pool’s edge. It was a time I was willing to negotiate, still, to change your mind’s direction, but in retrospect, I wish I’d had more dignity. The sun didn’t set till 7 pm and I tried to teach you how to back float, but you kept sinking. You scooped me up off the wet floor and carried me to the hallway that led to our hotel room, and I screamed and thrashed at you to put me down.

You ran a bath and left the door slightly ajar, talking to me the whole time against the sound of water running. I put a packet of salt in my coffee instead of sugar at breakfast, and it made me go red, drawing chuckles out of you when my nose scrunched up in disgust at the first sip. But you got up and sauntered to the Nespresso to bring me another cup, picked out the right sweetener, set it down with both hands in front of me. “Here you go, dork,” you said, sweetly.

I guess I’d known you too long to feign the perfection I reserve for strangers. When my American straightener didn’t work overseas, I let my long hair air dry curly all the way to dinner. I didn’t care to look pretty and polished, not for you. Our love for each other ran deeper than dressing myself up like an ornament just to be desired. I expected your desire irrespective.

In the span of one week, we slept in separate bedrooms, and we slept with your arms wrapped around me. You whispered, “You’re so tiny,” into my ear and I drenched the pillow with tears, back turned to you, till my eyes swelled and closed of their own accord. Yes, I felt small then, but it had nothing to do with the size of my body.

On that six hour road trip I tried to manufacture innocent nostalgia by playing old hits by The Script. You were driving through dark streets and hills and speaking to me in sweet tongues, one hand resting on my knee. I pushed it away, not sure why. We laughed in three airports, even standing in long queues to board was hilarious and silly. You put on my big, pink headphones and I took a photo. On the plane you fell asleep on my shoulder, and I held your bobbing head steady with my palm when we hit turbulence in the sky.

You picked me up from the airport after work, hoisting my suitcase into the backseat. I couldn’t stomach the awkwardness of a hug, so I slid into the passenger seat without so much as a hello. You got there early, and had to drive around in circles at the arrivals gate thrice until I came outside. “Why did you wear that shirt?” I asked flatly, “Are you trying to impress me?” With your eyes on the road, you chuckled quietly. “Is it working?” I despised your cyclical questions when I wanted honest answers. I despised how you knew me too well, and I knew you well enough to know not to expect a different ending, but I still did.

We were in a treehouse in the middle of the jungle, rain pattering loudly against glass. I wore no make up and you fixed your gaze on me from across the room, then confessed without pause - “You are very beautiful.” I guess I was, but I said, “What’s the point?” then downed the rest of my martini. My beauty wasn’t going to solve our problems. I packed my bag in silence after we missed dinner over an argument, then ordered room service for you even though you insisted you weren’t hungry. I’d started the fight, so I felt irredeemably guilty.

We stood in front of a waterfall and two girls glanced at us from the corner of my eye, talking to each other sheepishly. Did they think we were lucky, or happy? I wanted to scream and tell them my heart was breaking, that my perfect outfit was a disguise for my internal state, that the man next to me was gentle but also cruel. After a night of bargaining, you tried to teach me to play Champagne Problems on the keyboard to coax me gently out of my cage, but I walked out of the room somberly.

I let you have the last bite of every meal we ate, because seeing you satiated was enough to satiate me. You interlocked fingers with me on the drive to my hometown, two hours of sweat exchanged between palms. I stared out of the window and refused to look at you, until the sleep deprivation hit and made me collapse in your lap till we got to the hotel.

My cutting silence made you cry for the first time as we drove down to the beach. “Why won’t you say anything?” you pleaded, eyes welling into pools suddenly. Good, I remember thinking, that’s what you get for hurting me. Now you know how I feel. I wanted to slice your heart with the machete you used on me. I wanted to wrap you in that same barbed wire of anxiety in which you’d entangled me. I wanted you to hurt even worse for hurting me, and I could do it by simply going so steely quiet, it scared both of us how cruel I could be.

I didn’t make myself easy to love. But it was you who came looking for my love, when you knew exactly what I was offering. Then you lost your nerve, and I saw through the facade, right to the epicenter of your cowardice. I’ve reinvented myself a dozen times since then, fallen in love over and over, then landed on my feet like I always do. But they all barely scraped the surface of my iceberg, so it’s easy to toss them to the side and watch them sink. Nobody survives me, yet everybody wants to be my muse. My worst habit is my best talent. The words offer both ends of the bargain - an inflated ego that will make you smile at your reflection, and the pin I stick in your side to draw all the air out, until you can barely face yourself.

To say I love you still would be a lie. To say I once did, but I’m long over the mountain after tumbling down it too often in the past is more true. I know because I can write these things without having the urge to say a single word to you. I don’t care if you read, I don’t wonder who’s fucking you, and I don’t need to know if remorse eats you alive, even though “sorry” is your most frequently used word. Knowing you, it means nothing. You never apologized for what you actually did, just tucked your tail between your legs and fled like a scared dog, so afraid of me. But the stories are mine to tell, and I’ll narrate them for as long as I want. I never asked for your permission to demolish you, but then again, neither did you when you did it to me.