I wanted to quit falling for people who didn’t match my fervour. You picked a flower from your back alley to carry on the subway, all the way to my basement apartment. You smoked, waiting for me outside a party I said I might go to, until your cigarette burnt your fingers. You passed the interview. For a moment, I felt like we both knew. Self-sacrificial love was the language our mothers spoke, the kind we inherited. You could see into the gross writhing of my heart. You could carry it.
There’s some kind of metaphor here about being a mirror of each other. We’re both horribly down bad. Unstoppable forces pining for immovable objects. We’re lovers that exhaust our every effort to bask in the valiancy of surviving with scraps. We can give so much. We can get by with so little. We’re so cost effective.
Because I could recognize the symptoms of yearning, I also suspected you were someone who couldn’t hold the things they loved when they got it. You’d be drawn to warmth, then drop it like an ember. I suspected this about you, because I knew it was true about me. I knew this part of me would be so averse to the kind of love I wanted to give. This part of me needed love like a SWAT team barrelling through a boarded front door. I knew trying to keep you would be like trying to outsmart myself.
I’m in the hospital waiting room now, and I have to break the news to myself. The only options left are to let it end or make it end with dignity. When what’s coming next can only be the end or a miracle, I choose to believe in the secret third thing. Plus, I called a few psychics, and they said it’d work out.
My mom and I have a bad habit of mistaking cowardice for purity. We believe that being the first to reach, touch or hold someone means we’ve won something. We think the missing ingredient to fixing someone is somehow us. I kept dreaming about it: being the first to mend your clothes, to have the oven on when you came home, to waste a weekend at the beach with. I believe I was put on this earth to be relentless for someone.
I’m convinced I just haven’t played my cards right; through every round of your absence, I could have better strategized how to make you stay. I talked gameplans with friends who advised me to drop you, and with mediums who told me to keep loving you. If I could predict you well enough, maybe you wouldn’t scamper off like a fox with a foot caught in a trap. You speak this way about your exes, too, how the verdict always came out to be your fault. You hold fast to the belief that the solution to a sinking ship was your nail and hammer. I’m not strong enough to convince you otherwise. I just sit with the knowledge that love is a giant pyramid scheme for bottomless pits like us. We all want to fix someone a little more fucked up than us. We’re all addicted to the carrot and stick.
The point of no return is no longer updating friends on the situation because you know a good friend would never let you stay in it. I got tired of asking them to inspect an open wound, and they’re not doctors. I just needed one more excuse to play out an age-old habit. I needed one more excuse to believe in fate. I needed a reason to believe no one who could see me this deeply was also capable of hurting me. But the only way through this maze was retracing my steps back out. No amount of reasoning can kill a desire. And no amount of desire can mean it’s a good reason.
It takes a yearner to kill a yearner. I can’t imagine throwing pebbles at windows anymore. I’ve stopped stalking your house on Google Maps. Eventually, I’ll stop thinking of what to hypothetically pack you for lunch. I will not brave blizzards to fall down at a doorstep. I will not dig through the rubble until my hands bloom pink. I won’t crawl miles through the desert repenting, type shit. It’s just no longer cost-effective. But no, I will not be requesting a return. It’s not a regretful purchase. I would have stayed on the ground with you until you wanted to leave. Whatever you needed, I’d have given it, because you needed it, and so did I.
