This life is nothing if not predicable. The days they pass faster, as if gaining speed to ensure a deadly collision with a day I have conditioned myself to endure with more grace, but also wounds, as the years have progressed. Twelve years, in eleven days. One year less of half my lifetime. The emotional turmoil connected to this event is often catastrophic, life-changing, and irreversible. It also fosters relationships with those I trust, although this has dwindled far smaller than I ever dreamed as of late. I find that a mere twelve cycles around the sun has caused my life to so adequately, stunningly, but yet not alarmingly repeat. In a sense I am on my own again.
I cannot go to the boy that I have trusted this with for nearly three years now. Boundaries have been constructed, with good cause, and if I'm honest good affect. We are better apart. We are better without our secrets and our lies and our dishonest ways of ensuring that even though we were alone, we never had to be physically. His are still the arms that I yearn for, but somewhere deep down I know that those arms would never feel the same. That the world that was created when we touched back then has faltered, and inevitably fallen as a result of our conscious, and ever painful desire to kill whoever we used to be, together. We destroyed what we used to be in order to move on to build stronger, more meaningful and indestructible bonds with those that chose us, over all else. Because when it came down to it, we also chose them. We choose them still.
Tonight is harder, as I battle demons previously slayed by this savior I have given up. The impulse to run to him is nearly overwhelming. To walk through his door, and silently up his steps, and into his warm and ever inviting bed, as I have done dozens, maybe even a hundred times, before. He would open his arms and he would accept me for my pain, he would match me breath for breath until I calmed, he would kiss my forehead in the most gentle and caring way, and he wouldn't ask what was wrong because he knew that it was too much for me to explain, right here, right now. As the morning rays woke us he would ask, try to fix me before we needed to battle another day pretending that these midnight rendezvous' did not happen, that we didn't care, that maybe we never had. And everything would be safe, and familiar. But wrong.
Because even as I picture this scenerio in my head, I realize that the setting has changed. The characters have morphed to others, in different beds, holding each other just the same. But the girl lying there is terrified. Terrified that she is too much for the boy that encases her in protection because he knows, almost intuitively, that at night, when the dreams come, she will need it. He has known always, sacrificed many nights of sound sleep in order to ensure that he was there to silence her cries, to steady her racing heart, and hold her as she uncontrollably shook. She fears that she is too broken for him, and that in these moments, with this type of pain, he will see her for who she is. She is not the strong, methodical, challenging individual she perceives herself to be. She is as fragile as crystal, teetering on the edge of a table already bound for collapse.
But what she does not know is that she underestimates this man, his capabilities of fulfilling his rightful position as her savior. Clandestine from the day each of them was born, but thwarted by so many unknown forces.
The amount of times that they could have, should have, may even have unknowingly, met are infinite. He spent most of his childhood in the same backwoods small town that she eventually spent most of her adolescence. He vacationed at a lake that she was invited to every fourth of july for at least four years, only one of which she chose to attend. During that fated vacation her paddle boat was rescued by the boys next door, a group he no doubt belonged with, if he did not belong to. He went to highschool with two of her three ex-boyfriends. He was friends of friends of friends that rarely hung out. It's even probable that on a night she was escaping the hell her first boyfriend was slowly structuring her within, that she may have met this boy at a party and that they talked, may even have hit it off, exchanged numbers, been able to fall in love before either of them had ever been hurt, had she been single, had he been looking. But somehow they did not, or if they did circumstance kept them apart. And completely unaware of the other's cosmic struggles to break the curse.
This realization creates many emotions at once, all so overwhelming and all-consuming that you cannot pick one out within her crowded heart. She misses what she once had with a boy she knew she could never end up with to begin with. She yearns for a world where she did not have to make that choice. She rejoices in the fact that she realizes all of this, that he is unattainable, finally. She is stunned by the fact that she has fallen as completely as she has for this other boy, this boy that it is becoming more and more obvious was destined to meet her someday. Curiosity over why it has taken so long, why it is happening now, and if it will simply lead to new forms of pain. Doubt that she is enough for a man like this, even if he does not realize his potential quite yet. Worry that he will be like all the others, and either leave or be the object of my immediate disinterest someday. But under all of that is wonder. Wonder at the fact that she is capable of loving again, that she really does not have a choice.
And as if to silence the cacophony of emotion, the pain reverberates ever more intensely as she lies here alone. As I lie here alone, telling a story of a girl that I've somehow removed myself from. Forced to separate with in order to overcome the overwhelming and heart-breaking loss that is associated with this day, only eleven days away. And suddenly I am forced to realize the unimportance that each previous emotion has in reference to this.
And I find myself silently praying to my father I lost almost twelve years ago, that this boy will not only save me, but repair this empty space within my heart, within my mind, within my soul. Because maybe it had to happen this way, maybe we both needed to be broken in order to see that quality within each other. Maybe in the end, it is our brokenness that will allow us to fit together.
Falling in love with the idea of a knight in shining armor, but willing to settle for an utterly human and surely not faultless or untouchable, unshakeable boy,
J-L
