How About Them Apples? (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
applespice) wrote2010-11-30 11:34 pm
applespice) wrote2010-11-30 11:34 pm
Entry tags:
LJ Idol - Week 5 - Afterthought
The truth is, I always knew that I wasn't his first choice. Beneath all my desperate portrayals of romantic bliss and the passionate scribblings in my diary (I couldn't write the truth and make it real, let it twist around my heart in black ink loops), I knew. The knowledge was always there with me, a grim gray shadow behind my eyes, gradually draining the world of color.
But would would love me if not him? Who could love this plain, strange, quiet girl, still trapped in the blurry purgatory between knowing herself and pretending to be someone else?
In the mornings that I woke in my narrow dormitory bed, I was briefly, blissfully free of him. I was myself again. But, inevitably, the creeping day brought him back into my thoughts, and when night fell so did my defenses. I gave him his tariff of moans and kisses and feasted on his half-hearted "I love yous," telling myself that he did love me, really. Really, really, really he did. When I fell asleep in his bed, the heaviness of the world pressed in on me and I thought it a beautiful weight, even as it crushed me.
I saw the texts and instant messages. I heard the half-whispered phone conversations. I saw the way his eyes lingered on women who were not me. And each time that my heart shriveled and shook I told myself I misunderstood. I was a stupid, suspicious bitch and I didn't deserve him. Steadily, his poison settled into me, molded to my secret fears like second skin - the puckered skin of a wound, a scar. I was that girl, the one I'd never thought I'd be, and I told myself I loved the change as all I was sickened and died.
Only distance gave me the power to tear myself free. A few days before Christmas that year, sitting in my bedroom three hundred miles away from him, I ended it in a storm of weeping. It was the little things that broke me - the photographs of him with another girl appearing on his Facebook page less than a day after I'd left the state for break, the flirtatious messages back and forth, his refusal to call me, and his clipped conversation when I called him. He cried, too, and told me I was wrong - he never had and never would- how could I think- he loved me- he didn't want this to be over. And this time, I pushed aside the lie and found the truth, filthy and ugly and cringing beneath.
I was the afterthought; the virgin he chased and overcame and tired of. He stayed with me because it was easy, because he "didn't have to try," and because I forgave him. I was too nice and too pure, and I wouldn't let him call me "bitch" in bed. All this I heard, the words beneath the words, as he wept the tears of a man who has been dumped by a woman he never thought was good enough for him. And suddenly dry-eyed, light, and powerful, I hung up the phone.
But would would love me if not him? Who could love this plain, strange, quiet girl, still trapped in the blurry purgatory between knowing herself and pretending to be someone else?
In the mornings that I woke in my narrow dormitory bed, I was briefly, blissfully free of him. I was myself again. But, inevitably, the creeping day brought him back into my thoughts, and when night fell so did my defenses. I gave him his tariff of moans and kisses and feasted on his half-hearted "I love yous," telling myself that he did love me, really. Really, really, really he did. When I fell asleep in his bed, the heaviness of the world pressed in on me and I thought it a beautiful weight, even as it crushed me.
I saw the texts and instant messages. I heard the half-whispered phone conversations. I saw the way his eyes lingered on women who were not me. And each time that my heart shriveled and shook I told myself I misunderstood. I was a stupid, suspicious bitch and I didn't deserve him. Steadily, his poison settled into me, molded to my secret fears like second skin - the puckered skin of a wound, a scar. I was that girl, the one I'd never thought I'd be, and I told myself I loved the change as all I was sickened and died.
Only distance gave me the power to tear myself free. A few days before Christmas that year, sitting in my bedroom three hundred miles away from him, I ended it in a storm of weeping. It was the little things that broke me - the photographs of him with another girl appearing on his Facebook page less than a day after I'd left the state for break, the flirtatious messages back and forth, his refusal to call me, and his clipped conversation when I called him. He cried, too, and told me I was wrong - he never had and never would- how could I think- he loved me- he didn't want this to be over. And this time, I pushed aside the lie and found the truth, filthy and ugly and cringing beneath.
I was the afterthought; the virgin he chased and overcame and tired of. He stayed with me because it was easy, because he "didn't have to try," and because I forgave him. I was too nice and too pure, and I wouldn't let him call me "bitch" in bed. All this I heard, the words beneath the words, as he wept the tears of a man who has been dumped by a woman he never thought was good enough for him. And suddenly dry-eyed, light, and powerful, I hung up the phone.
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