Forever Seventeen

I understand why he chose her. I am a cherry red lipstick stain and she is a soft pink, inviting and sweet, I am anger and hurt, desperate for attention. She is calm like the ocean and I am a hurricane. She is sweet like the sea and I am destruction, she is everything he needs and I am nothing he wants.

I understand why he chose her I truly do, that doesn’t make it hurt any less. Especially when he tells me he finds beauty in my destruction, that he finds perfection in the wreckage I create. I love him and he loves her, I get it, I really do I just wish it was different.

I am a bruise on his arm slowly disappearing she is a scar forever there and forever with him. I will fade away and he will forget me, forget my feel, my look… But her, he will see her all the time and he will never forget her shape, her taste or her feel. I wish he would remember me but I think I understand… I just wish he would let me go.

I am self-destruction, the text book case of a bad kid, angry, hurt, broken, just starving for attention. I am self-destructive behaviors and hurtful words, I am sleepless nights and angry conversations. I am not happiness or flowers or the sun, I am dark and unforgiving like the night.

She is pretty words and lovely spring days, with green grass and blossoming flowers, she is a cheeky smile and never ending phone calls. She is my best friend and a part of me, she is the one he wants and she is the one I hate. I wish I was her, I really do but I am not so just let me go.

Please just let me disappear.

*

I need him to tell me I am nothing; I need him to give up on me so I can give up on him. I need him to tell me he doesn’t want me so I can learn not to want him. I need him to shout he doesn’t love me so I can stop loving him, but he won’t do this. No he will string me along because he is too afraid to set me free. He is afraid that once I go he will want me.

I just need a push, I need a little encouragement so I can fly away. I am a baby bird waiting for its mumma to let it go, I am waiting for him to let me go. He won’t, he will sneak into my heart and kiss me lightly and speak quiet words of love and steal my soul again. He will be mine for a moment and I will be powerless to stop it.

In my seventeen years I have never loved and hated someone like I hate and love him. I have never been rendered so weak, I have never loved so much and hated all the same. I have never needed someone like this before, like I need him.

I need him to be strong for me, I need him to say goodbye before I can even consider saying it back.

He was mine for a fleeting moment, for a stolen kiss and a whispered set of words, he was mine for a minute he was hers forever. She didn’t appreciate him like I would have, I would have held his hand through it all, I would have kissed his tears away. I would have whispered sweet words into his hair and held him tight on sad nights, I would have touched him with passion and love and everything a person ever wants to feel. I would have loved him, she never loved him.

She never wanted him like I did. She didn’t taste him in her tears, feel his touch in her heart, she never trembled under his gaze. She didn’t want him I did, she never appreciated what she had. He didn’t touch me like he touched her, he didn’t crave to be near me, he didn’t feel dizzy under my kisses, he didn’t dream of me. I was simply there, nothing more and nothing less.

I should be glad I am something but I am not, I wish I mean more.

The day I realized I loved him was a Wednesday, he was reading a book and as I stared at him I knew he would forever be mine. He met her a week later and he realized he loved her, she was bored and I was forgotten. A side note to a perfect story. She was the whole damn book and I was a line, sweet and bitter but mostly easily ignored.

I was nothing more than a passing glance when he met her; I was thrown aside until he needed me again. He only ever needed me when she got bored, when she would text other boys and he would tell me her lips tasted of lies and she smelt of death. He only ever needed me when he was angry; I became a paragraph at most, a paragraph used as revenge.

And then she would take him back, plead for him to have faith in her, whisper apologies and he would smile and forget that my hands were reaching for him desperately, that I was trying to hold onto him. He would forget I was there and I became a sentence again, bitter and sweet, easily forgotten and thrown aside until it all began again.

I wonder what our book would have been like, I hope it would have been a never ending tale. A tale of happiness and sweet memories and smiles. I wish we would have been epic, I wish we would have had the chance to find out. I wish he had given me a chance to prove I am more than revenge.

I wish I felt more than revenge.

I wish I am more than revenge, but even I know I am not and I am resigned to my fate as second best. I am forever hoping and forever breaking. I am forever seventeen and I am forever lost, forever lost in his eyes, his beautifully ordinary eyes.