I thought I was out of the woods after Toronto. After months steeped in darkness thick, a flickering flame: I was happy. Happy for days.
Space from Boston had rejuvenated me—stretched my ties till broken and lit in me a hope, effervescent. I was the girl from last fall again—one you called carefree. That depiction that had irked me then, and now, oh, how I wish it were true.
The happiness had arrived so abruptly it was alien. Wrong, almost. Out of place, an out-of-body experience. So intensely and thoroughly, though, that I wondered — genuinely wondered — how I could ever be sad again, in the deep-seated way I had been this fall: entrenched in misery, always half a hiccup from the ugliest of ugly cries, a quarter-conundrum from hightailing the fuck out of this god-forsaken hellhole. Not wanting to be. Never wanting to be.
The bubble burst when we collided in a whispered reconciliation.
I'm ready. Let's be friends.
The chasm sealed. Invisible tethers and ingrained pathways led me right back to you. You were my person again—the one I called that afternoon when my laptop tumbled off my bike, the one I texted in the evening after a stranger followed me from Whole Foods.
I dreamed of you that night. The dream dissipated when I woke, but it left me unsettled, so utterly sick of you to the point of nausea but bound to the vision of our shoulders brushing as my hand grazed yours.
You're not mine.
I saw your tennis racket at the office. I know you are still playing with her.
"Are you back to hating me again?" you asked the next day.
Oh. A pause. How'd you know?
"You're so uncomfortable that you can't even look me in the eye."
It's not you. It's me. It's always me.
I hate how I am with you.
I hate me.
We decided on space.
Again.
This is it.
Please.
No more.
Let the cavern open wide.