You sit on the front steps of my parents building. The kind of building where you can’t really sit on the steps. You look broken- defeated. I lift up my hand and gesture to my engagement ring “weddings are so stressful! Don’t ever get married!”, and as I laugh to lighten your mood I notice you have on a wedding ring. It’s a gold band. Classic, elegant even. She picked it out. Your wife has excellent taste. Your wife.
I wake up.
Shit.
I suddenly realize I shouldn’t care. You have someone…I have someone. That’s the way it should be. And I don’t love you anymore- I gave up on you as soon as you gave up on me- a long time ago. But for some reason the sting is still real.
The night I was coming down and you told me you could never love me. That was the worst night of my life. It felt like being sliced in half with a razor (or how I imagine that must feel). I sat in my room for 2 weeks, in the dark, listening to Linda Ronstadt and Dashboard Confessional and feeling dead. I was dead.
But now I’m with him. I’m over you. He is more open then you ever were. He knows how to show me he loves me. He knows how to protect me. He knows how to hold me. You were never even in the same league as he is.
So why do I still feel dead when I think about that time? Those 6 months of my life that I wasted on you, hoping you would realize how fucking lucky you are. You were.
That was almost 5 years ago. And I haven’t seen you since that summer; the summer I did everything I could to avoid feeling. It hurt too much to feel with you. Just lying there with you I felt…sad. Good sad though, like the kind of sad you feel at the end of a Nicolas Sparks novel. Almost sad in a beautiful kind of way. Shimmering like city lights or stars in a desert.
I look over at him. My future husband. A man I love more than I ever thought I loved you. I don’t deserve to be this lucky- to be this loved. I lay back- look at the white painted chipped ceiling and allow the sound of the fan to lull me to sleep.
posted by D @ 1:28 PM
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