by Erin Ajello
Sometimes, I see the look on your face when I break down or tense up and I know that you’re lost. I am unfamiliar territory, even to boys who have had long term relationships and girls who have dated ‘my type’ before. You don’t know how to deal with depression when it’s mixed with anxiety, let alone when it’s edged with doubt. You, my pretty, sad boy, keep your calm and your confidence. I am sure of nothing other than that the shadows in front of me aren’t real but also don’t want to leave me alone. But you have the burden of being my rock and when you are shaken to the point of apathy by the same tragedies that have yet to leave me, anger creeps past everything else lying in my heart and takes hold.
And tonight, baby, tonight has gone far past that. Tonight my doubts are only about you and how long you’ll bother to stay here. I wonder how long I’ll even want you to. Once that thought occurs, the rest flows easily. If you’re destined to leave and I’ll end up a wreck again (what boat can last without an anchor when it’s already off the charts?), well then, I have nothing to lose beyond you. So then, anything that would make me lose you, like say writing you out beyond the repair of your reputation, doesn’t hold any consequence anymore.
Because, you see, me writing about people I know oh so intimately and describing them so fucking accurately and selling every syllable of everything they told me personally is such an old trick that I’ve got scars younger than it. And my favorite part is that I’m GOOD at it! I can write about love and pain and sex and death so well that readers have goosebumps and consider it fiction because they’re too scared of what it means if these words are real.
But you, baby, you I never wanted to turn into these crisp cold letters on this heartless page. You I had hopes for (I thought the ring would be made of metal, not ink). This time I can forgive you and I know in a few hours, when we climb into bed, I’ll cover you in kisses and “I’m so sorry’s” and “I love you’s” and “Oh god yes’s” until you fall asleep a bit more tired but a hell of a lot happier. You’ll sleep soundly, and for every minute you do, every heartbeat that you are too out of it to hear, I’ll be planning again and thinking of how to make this hurt more later, when/if we end (because even now I know we will, though you still hope.)
No matter. I’ll save these notes now, and when we do end, I’ll be even colder, finally the corpse I always longed to be, only coming back as a ghost just long enough to really haunt you, sending you away with every word you wish no one else could read about you.
And do you know what you’ll hate the most?
That your precious babygirl was the one who wrote it all.
xoxo, yours or something.
