Wishing

You wish you’d never met him.
You wish she’d never met him.
You wish none of us had.

You wish you hadn’t said you’d be that one boy’s girlfriend.
You wish you hadn’t said you’d meet him from college, that one Tuesday after the English exam.
You wish he hadn’t been sat there too.

But wishes aren’t worth anything these days. Wishes don’t come true.
Not when you wish when all those candles on your birthday are snuffed, like the year that’s gone, like that one more year of your life has been put out, so succinctly.
Not when you wish on that special moment when the clock turns 11:11.

Not on that falling star you saw that night after the day you spent with him.

No matter how much you care for them, how you love her, how you care for him, it doesn’t matter.
It’s just ruined everything, torn it apart.

All he’s brought with his presence is hurt, jealously and heartache.

And you hate him for it. But you don’t.
You don’t hate.
You still care, care for him; he’s your best friend.
Why do you have to?
You don’t want to.

But ‘you want’ is about as much use as ‘you wish’.
Nothing.
Worthless.
About as much use as deutschmarks during hyperinflation.
Good for burning, for destruction, devastation.
Those small phrases will rip apart your mind in their simplicity. They’ll lure you into a sense of security, someone will offer you the world and you’ll believe them. But it’s all lies; all of it. Those words, they’ll make you realise what could be, what could have been, what you’ll never have.

And they’ll make you yearn for it more than ever. And all that matters is that you lost. You lost your best friend, you lost your chance. You lost him, and happiness along with it.
You dared to use the word ‘perfect’, and with that curse, it all falls apart.
Of course it would, nothing’s perfect. You realised that, you wrote about it, you spoke out of it.
But you can’t listen to yourself, and in your idiocy and naïvety you thought ‘just this once’, but of course not. It’ll never be your turn, ever. You’ll always sit back and watch and be happy for those who beat you to it, as you have to be.

It’s what’s expected, isn’t it?

After all you’re the kind, forgiving one. If you can forgive him, that, then surely you can forgive anything. Because obviously that was ‘out of order’.

So of course you have to be happy. You have to forgive that. You have to forgive the lies and the using and the fact that she’s your best friend.

You have to handle it calmly, better than they would, because God only knows that that’s your place. That’s how you handle everything. You’re happy for them because they’re your friends. No one else considers the ‘what could have been’s. No one’s sorry for how hurt you could be. Not like you were for them.

No.

They don’t care. They got what they wanted.
They won.
And you’re left behind; the eternal bridesmaid that had her chance and threw it away for other people’s opinion.

The one that realised minutes too late, what she’d done.
The one who learned a brutal lesson through harsh experience.
The one who threw away her one chance of happiness.

Like always, it’s now that fraction of an inch away from you. A fraction of an inch you can’t cross alone, and the one who could cross it with you is slowly strolling away into an oh-so-romantic sunset, with the one who was meant to reconcile you that you couldn’t cross.

And they turn back and laugh in their exuberant happiness at their fairytale ending.
Oblivious at your pain, that it could have been yours.

You never know what you have, until you’ve lost it.
And, God knows, you lost it.

Oh how you wish you could have got it right, just once.