Status: One-shot (:
I Loved Him, Present Tense
..
Three nights. Three nights was all it took.
Now that it all just comes back in flashes, like a kaleidoscope of too few memories, I can honestly say that I had never once thought that everything would turn out like this. I can’t seem to bring myself to the point of calling this a love story; because I don’t think it was – not for him, at least.
I was in the winter of my life, and he was my only summer. In retrospect, I had him placed on a pedestal so high that he had no other option than to let me down in such a way that I had struggled to recover for so many months to come.
At night I fell asleep with visions of myself dancing and laughing and crying with him, for the first time in so many years, the pain of my past seemed redundant, and he was the only thing that sustained me. My thoughts always seem to stray back to what I had once thought was this beautiful mystery, tall and dark and brooding man as it was written in the stars, but maybe the stars played too much of a part in my quixotic romance, because as fate tells us in the form of Romeo and Juliet, or the late Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed, that star-crossed lovers always end in tragedy. And that was what I was feeling; deep within the depths of my soul I felt the tragedy of disappointment and loss, not just loss of a treasured friend, a possible lover, but also the essence of my true self.
I had never been the type of person who counted on anyone but herself, and sadly I cannot say that my attempts at romance weren’t premeditated. As a jilted lover, I had walked onto the premises of my old stomping ground, ready for war or anything that could possibly be thrown at me. And then I saw him, in all honesty, the first thing I saw was not a friend, no perfect specimen, no clear hint of love at not-first-sight, but a ploy in my little vindictive game that I was left to play in my own bitterness.
I approached him slowly, hopped up on confidence and slight nervousness because I was the known outsider in the crowd that surrounded him, but I didn’t care, I wasn’t there to play their game, I was there to win mine.
It wasn’t really anything he said, or anything he did, it was the feeling that came along with my actions that created the state of dim euphoria I found myself in. Despite my cold exterior and vengeful plans, as I took my seat next to the man I had known for little less than a year, I found myself thinking that I could get used to the feeling of having him next to me, I could get used to him.
As I look back on the first night I spent with him, I had come to realize that even though we were friends, and that we had once spent a night happily talking about of deepest, most personal thoughts until dawn, we were strangers outside of the virtual world, and though his name had meant so much to me as I stared down at my phone, I had yet to be acquainted with the exterior, the owner of the cell phone.
I laughed and shamelessly flirted with the man on my left without having to act as I often find myself having to do. Though our surroundings did not allow us to gaze at each other directly, or even engage in some form of stimulating conversation, I preferred it as it was. I was not the type of girl who often went out on dates, or even spoke to people outside of my immediate circle, and the only two boyfriends I have had in my past were childhood friends. I had no clue how to act in the situation I found myself in, but in that first night with him, while I was buttoning his cufflinks and sharing his potato chips, I was freed from the pressure that my over-analyzing had placed upon my shoulders.
Having a flare for the dramatic myself, I dare to say that I had changed that night. Always believing that new love was not for me, that people were not for me, I found myself in my bedroom that night, my mind filled with song lyrics about enchantment and fairytales. My thoughts would echo his name until I see him again, and so my rollercoaster began.
My mother always told me that I was an unusual girl; my always shifting moral compass never seemed to point to north, which is why I already had a plan formulated in the back of my mind as the new object of my affection suddenly became available.
As my thoughts reach my fingertips, I realize that no magic from those first moments could possibly be recaptured. It is also important to remember that even though these memories are what keep me sane on nights of doubt, that we don’t remember what happened, what we remember becomes what happened.
For a few short days, my cyber friend had become the person I got to spend my nights with. I had gotten to breathe the same air, and awkwardly sit next to him, or wrists quickly touching. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. I then had the chance to return home and discuss his thoughts, and as my plan continued to play out perfectly, the night I had waited for was upon us. Behind my phone, I stifled my smile has he confessed his feelings for me, something I had been aware of for months, but never really cared for.
Now that I thought about him that way, to borrow a phrase from fifth grade vernacular, returning his feelings had brought me a sense of satisfaction that I had yet to feel in the year that was quickly and very uneventfully passing me by.
Everything seemed to be bubble gum and raindrops for a few days, and not even the cold of the decade could keep me from seeing him again. My plans of revenge had taken a back seat, and with a vermilion coloured nose, I found myself in the same spot the following week gazing around for him like a small child in a store, looking for their parents.
The tale of the second night seems to fall short when it comes to the expectant ears I have told my to a dozen times, but it’s the night that still gives me chills as the little things seem to mean so much more than it should.
No words were spoken that night, except my unfortunate “yay” that I had let slip upon bumping into him while descending the staircase. I don’t believe our eyes even met, but as I am awfully sentimental, his embrace meant more to me than anything else he could have said or done. I was held in his big arms for no more than ten seconds, and as we let go, our hands remained intertwined, and our fingertips touching for as long as possible before we went our separate ways, not to cross paths again that night.
As giddy as his embrace made me, it was the little things he confessed that night when the night was over. Some of the lines he had spoken, the only ones I truly remember, was his trademark, the “I’m sorry” that I so often heard and had grown to adore, followed by “After I saw you, I went looking for you, but I couldn’t find you” which was completely my fault, and lastly, “I was so nervous that you were watching that I forgot my moves” because he was a performer in the show, which I had unfortunately missed that night.
The “I’m sorry’’ s had since been replaced with “Just leave it” or “It’s fine”, the only thing he’s looking for now is a gentle way to tell me to leave him alone, and the only reason I could make him nervous now is because of my unstable and vicious outbursts that that he was unfortunate enough to be the victim of.
I find it’s better for my sanity not to ask the burning questions every girl has to ask, even though I had never thought that I would be one of those girls. I wondered if he thought about those nights, or about the monster he had seen me become. There was so little good and so much bad, the path we walked was a dark and difficult one, or so it seemed to me, but as I sit in my bedroom at 11:04PM on his birthday, I wondered if he thought about it at all.
I distinctly remember the cold air that surrounded our small town on that Friday night, the last night. My misguided attempt to dress up turned into an awkward outfit that I recount with a shudder. A SpongeBob hooded jacket, highly overrated black jeggings and the only pair of heels I owned despite the fact that I couldn’t walk in them. Against my better judgement, I left the house feeling uncomfortable in my own skin, nose still bright red from my horrendous cold.
He wasn’t himself that night. Or as I came to realize, he was his true self that night. I found him on his own, staring out at the field of grass I saw before him. I stopped walking before he could see me, my heels sinking into the mud from the rain a few hours earlier. I looked at the man I had come to adore, angry, sad and everything in between, and selfishly I inwardly complained that I had gotten myself into something horrible. I didn’t feel like trying to cheer someone up who didn’t even have the decency to smile at me, this was not the same person from just a few days ago whom I joked and played with.
This was a perfect example of the effect this man had on me. I approached him slowly, joining in staring at the view in front of us, not saying much. I don’t quite remember, and I don’t think any reader should care about which words were exchanged that night, but I vividly remember the hug we shared to the point where the butterflies in my stomach has returned as I recount it.
I hugged him, but even in my six-inch heels, he was still half a head taller than I was, his arms as big as my head, something I would brag to my friends about to this very day. I attempted to let him go, but he refused, and held on to me. We stood there, alone in the cold, in each other’s embrace for minutes on end, and that was to become one of my favourite memories.
Though the little things we said would always mean so much to me, I can’t find the words to explain why they did, and to put down in words what we had said would be very anticlimactic. As a self-proclaimed wiseass, I regret saying as much as I did, or talking about myself when he was at war with himself in ways I was yet to fully apprehend, acknowledge, or grasp.
What stood out to me then, but had since lost its significance, was that through his pain, and his drama and his disappointment in life, I had somehow managed to make him smile. I found myself replaying the scenes, thinking that it had to mean something, especially after I realized what a smile from him meant. I had to force myself to stop, self-destruction was only beautiful up to the point where you could turn back and save yourself. And I’ve never been good at saving myself.
I remember looking at him, and him telling me that he couldn’t look at me, or else he would blush, and when he finally did look at me, I had to look away or I would have buckled under the intensity of his gaze. I was suddenly so self conscious, as if he would stop liking me if he looked at me long enough, as if he would realize I wasn’t pretty enough, or I wasn’t at all what he thought I was. Either way, I shifted my gaze away from him.
The night was coming to a close and his cue to perform was coming up, and we had to make our way to the room where his group assembled. He walked fast, and I struggled to keep up with him. Our conversation had shifted to the bubblegum nothingness I had known so well, filled with petty arguments that I now realize would have gotten old in a matter of time.
We stopped at the staircase where he was to walk up, and I was to go down. He didn’t look at me, but I looked at him, taking him in completely as to reserve a place for him in my long term memory where he would stay.
We gave each other a quick hug goodbye.
“You were amazing.” I told him, recounting the night.
“You were amazing.” He echoed.
I watched him ascend the staircase, him not meeting my gaze again. As I turned away, I knew inside of me that I would never see him again.
In those three nights, so many things had been awoken inside of me, I was a dreamer by heart, and suddenly he was a part of every single one of them. But upon an unfortunate series of events saw those dreams dashed and divided, like a million stars in the night sky.
The crazy thing is, I don’t know if I’m ever going to be able to feel that way again. He was my last hope, he was my only hope. His world moved so fast, his spiral of self destruction and self loathing was keeping him from me, and there was nothing I could say, and nothing I could do, despite all my best efforts. Eventually I gave up, because I was a drizzle and he was a hurricane, and he knew I just wasn’t strong enough to be the part of him that I already claimed as my own.
And in all that, the late night battles for the man I still wasn’t even completely sure I wanted, I lost myself to the point where I couldn’t live with myself. Being alone with my thoughts was the kind of darkness that I feared.
Losing him was nothing compared to the pain of losing me, and the path that I still walked to this very day trying to get back to who I was, though I’m not even sure I want to go back to that person. He changed me, he made me different, and then he left. But that was something I can never tell him because his broad shoulders already carries the blame for so many things that he will never tell me. And in that way, I understood him. And I loved him. To me, after what I had seen and heard, he wasn’t even a person to me anymore. But I loved him, present tense.
As of now, I realize that self-destruction starts with believing that a person is more than a person. I now see that he was no miracle, he was not perfect, he was no adventure, he was just a man with the world on his shoulders looking for someone to trust.
He has scarred me, and I have scarred him, but I still don’t know better, and if I was ever given the chance, I would take it because if I could choose the person who would destroy me inside and out, it would be him every time.
Now that it all just comes back in flashes, like a kaleidoscope of too few memories, I can honestly say that I had never once thought that everything would turn out like this. I can’t seem to bring myself to the point of calling this a love story; because I don’t think it was – not for him, at least.
I was in the winter of my life, and he was my only summer. In retrospect, I had him placed on a pedestal so high that he had no other option than to let me down in such a way that I had struggled to recover for so many months to come.
At night I fell asleep with visions of myself dancing and laughing and crying with him, for the first time in so many years, the pain of my past seemed redundant, and he was the only thing that sustained me. My thoughts always seem to stray back to what I had once thought was this beautiful mystery, tall and dark and brooding man as it was written in the stars, but maybe the stars played too much of a part in my quixotic romance, because as fate tells us in the form of Romeo and Juliet, or the late Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed, that star-crossed lovers always end in tragedy. And that was what I was feeling; deep within the depths of my soul I felt the tragedy of disappointment and loss, not just loss of a treasured friend, a possible lover, but also the essence of my true self.
I had never been the type of person who counted on anyone but herself, and sadly I cannot say that my attempts at romance weren’t premeditated. As a jilted lover, I had walked onto the premises of my old stomping ground, ready for war or anything that could possibly be thrown at me. And then I saw him, in all honesty, the first thing I saw was not a friend, no perfect specimen, no clear hint of love at not-first-sight, but a ploy in my little vindictive game that I was left to play in my own bitterness.
I approached him slowly, hopped up on confidence and slight nervousness because I was the known outsider in the crowd that surrounded him, but I didn’t care, I wasn’t there to play their game, I was there to win mine.
It wasn’t really anything he said, or anything he did, it was the feeling that came along with my actions that created the state of dim euphoria I found myself in. Despite my cold exterior and vengeful plans, as I took my seat next to the man I had known for little less than a year, I found myself thinking that I could get used to the feeling of having him next to me, I could get used to him.
As I look back on the first night I spent with him, I had come to realize that even though we were friends, and that we had once spent a night happily talking about of deepest, most personal thoughts until dawn, we were strangers outside of the virtual world, and though his name had meant so much to me as I stared down at my phone, I had yet to be acquainted with the exterior, the owner of the cell phone.
I laughed and shamelessly flirted with the man on my left without having to act as I often find myself having to do. Though our surroundings did not allow us to gaze at each other directly, or even engage in some form of stimulating conversation, I preferred it as it was. I was not the type of girl who often went out on dates, or even spoke to people outside of my immediate circle, and the only two boyfriends I have had in my past were childhood friends. I had no clue how to act in the situation I found myself in, but in that first night with him, while I was buttoning his cufflinks and sharing his potato chips, I was freed from the pressure that my over-analyzing had placed upon my shoulders.
Having a flare for the dramatic myself, I dare to say that I had changed that night. Always believing that new love was not for me, that people were not for me, I found myself in my bedroom that night, my mind filled with song lyrics about enchantment and fairytales. My thoughts would echo his name until I see him again, and so my rollercoaster began.
My mother always told me that I was an unusual girl; my always shifting moral compass never seemed to point to north, which is why I already had a plan formulated in the back of my mind as the new object of my affection suddenly became available.
As my thoughts reach my fingertips, I realize that no magic from those first moments could possibly be recaptured. It is also important to remember that even though these memories are what keep me sane on nights of doubt, that we don’t remember what happened, what we remember becomes what happened.
For a few short days, my cyber friend had become the person I got to spend my nights with. I had gotten to breathe the same air, and awkwardly sit next to him, or wrists quickly touching. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. I then had the chance to return home and discuss his thoughts, and as my plan continued to play out perfectly, the night I had waited for was upon us. Behind my phone, I stifled my smile has he confessed his feelings for me, something I had been aware of for months, but never really cared for.
Now that I thought about him that way, to borrow a phrase from fifth grade vernacular, returning his feelings had brought me a sense of satisfaction that I had yet to feel in the year that was quickly and very uneventfully passing me by.
Everything seemed to be bubble gum and raindrops for a few days, and not even the cold of the decade could keep me from seeing him again. My plans of revenge had taken a back seat, and with a vermilion coloured nose, I found myself in the same spot the following week gazing around for him like a small child in a store, looking for their parents.
The tale of the second night seems to fall short when it comes to the expectant ears I have told my to a dozen times, but it’s the night that still gives me chills as the little things seem to mean so much more than it should.
No words were spoken that night, except my unfortunate “yay” that I had let slip upon bumping into him while descending the staircase. I don’t believe our eyes even met, but as I am awfully sentimental, his embrace meant more to me than anything else he could have said or done. I was held in his big arms for no more than ten seconds, and as we let go, our hands remained intertwined, and our fingertips touching for as long as possible before we went our separate ways, not to cross paths again that night.
As giddy as his embrace made me, it was the little things he confessed that night when the night was over. Some of the lines he had spoken, the only ones I truly remember, was his trademark, the “I’m sorry” that I so often heard and had grown to adore, followed by “After I saw you, I went looking for you, but I couldn’t find you” which was completely my fault, and lastly, “I was so nervous that you were watching that I forgot my moves” because he was a performer in the show, which I had unfortunately missed that night.
The “I’m sorry’’ s had since been replaced with “Just leave it” or “It’s fine”, the only thing he’s looking for now is a gentle way to tell me to leave him alone, and the only reason I could make him nervous now is because of my unstable and vicious outbursts that that he was unfortunate enough to be the victim of.
I find it’s better for my sanity not to ask the burning questions every girl has to ask, even though I had never thought that I would be one of those girls. I wondered if he thought about those nights, or about the monster he had seen me become. There was so little good and so much bad, the path we walked was a dark and difficult one, or so it seemed to me, but as I sit in my bedroom at 11:04PM on his birthday, I wondered if he thought about it at all.
I distinctly remember the cold air that surrounded our small town on that Friday night, the last night. My misguided attempt to dress up turned into an awkward outfit that I recount with a shudder. A SpongeBob hooded jacket, highly overrated black jeggings and the only pair of heels I owned despite the fact that I couldn’t walk in them. Against my better judgement, I left the house feeling uncomfortable in my own skin, nose still bright red from my horrendous cold.
He wasn’t himself that night. Or as I came to realize, he was his true self that night. I found him on his own, staring out at the field of grass I saw before him. I stopped walking before he could see me, my heels sinking into the mud from the rain a few hours earlier. I looked at the man I had come to adore, angry, sad and everything in between, and selfishly I inwardly complained that I had gotten myself into something horrible. I didn’t feel like trying to cheer someone up who didn’t even have the decency to smile at me, this was not the same person from just a few days ago whom I joked and played with.
This was a perfect example of the effect this man had on me. I approached him slowly, joining in staring at the view in front of us, not saying much. I don’t quite remember, and I don’t think any reader should care about which words were exchanged that night, but I vividly remember the hug we shared to the point where the butterflies in my stomach has returned as I recount it.
I hugged him, but even in my six-inch heels, he was still half a head taller than I was, his arms as big as my head, something I would brag to my friends about to this very day. I attempted to let him go, but he refused, and held on to me. We stood there, alone in the cold, in each other’s embrace for minutes on end, and that was to become one of my favourite memories.
Though the little things we said would always mean so much to me, I can’t find the words to explain why they did, and to put down in words what we had said would be very anticlimactic. As a self-proclaimed wiseass, I regret saying as much as I did, or talking about myself when he was at war with himself in ways I was yet to fully apprehend, acknowledge, or grasp.
What stood out to me then, but had since lost its significance, was that through his pain, and his drama and his disappointment in life, I had somehow managed to make him smile. I found myself replaying the scenes, thinking that it had to mean something, especially after I realized what a smile from him meant. I had to force myself to stop, self-destruction was only beautiful up to the point where you could turn back and save yourself. And I’ve never been good at saving myself.
I remember looking at him, and him telling me that he couldn’t look at me, or else he would blush, and when he finally did look at me, I had to look away or I would have buckled under the intensity of his gaze. I was suddenly so self conscious, as if he would stop liking me if he looked at me long enough, as if he would realize I wasn’t pretty enough, or I wasn’t at all what he thought I was. Either way, I shifted my gaze away from him.
The night was coming to a close and his cue to perform was coming up, and we had to make our way to the room where his group assembled. He walked fast, and I struggled to keep up with him. Our conversation had shifted to the bubblegum nothingness I had known so well, filled with petty arguments that I now realize would have gotten old in a matter of time.
We stopped at the staircase where he was to walk up, and I was to go down. He didn’t look at me, but I looked at him, taking him in completely as to reserve a place for him in my long term memory where he would stay.
We gave each other a quick hug goodbye.
“You were amazing.” I told him, recounting the night.
“You were amazing.” He echoed.
I watched him ascend the staircase, him not meeting my gaze again. As I turned away, I knew inside of me that I would never see him again.
In those three nights, so many things had been awoken inside of me, I was a dreamer by heart, and suddenly he was a part of every single one of them. But upon an unfortunate series of events saw those dreams dashed and divided, like a million stars in the night sky.
The crazy thing is, I don’t know if I’m ever going to be able to feel that way again. He was my last hope, he was my only hope. His world moved so fast, his spiral of self destruction and self loathing was keeping him from me, and there was nothing I could say, and nothing I could do, despite all my best efforts. Eventually I gave up, because I was a drizzle and he was a hurricane, and he knew I just wasn’t strong enough to be the part of him that I already claimed as my own.
And in all that, the late night battles for the man I still wasn’t even completely sure I wanted, I lost myself to the point where I couldn’t live with myself. Being alone with my thoughts was the kind of darkness that I feared.
Losing him was nothing compared to the pain of losing me, and the path that I still walked to this very day trying to get back to who I was, though I’m not even sure I want to go back to that person. He changed me, he made me different, and then he left. But that was something I can never tell him because his broad shoulders already carries the blame for so many things that he will never tell me. And in that way, I understood him. And I loved him. To me, after what I had seen and heard, he wasn’t even a person to me anymore. But I loved him, present tense.
As of now, I realize that self-destruction starts with believing that a person is more than a person. I now see that he was no miracle, he was not perfect, he was no adventure, he was just a man with the world on his shoulders looking for someone to trust.
He has scarred me, and I have scarred him, but I still don’t know better, and if I was ever given the chance, I would take it because if I could choose the person who would destroy me inside and out, it would be him every time.
♠ ♠ ♠
**