The more time passes, the more we realize that this cannot last.
We are ridiculous, clutching to something that always had short shelf life and too many expectations. We are the Someday People, knowing that someday never comes and never taking any real risks on each other, emotional or otherwise. We are lovers who can never admit to being any such thing. Knowing it has to end, though, makes every moment feel inevitable; right now is all we will ever have. It is an addiction, necessary, hard to put down and impossible to walk away from. We are like tides of the ocean, pushing away and pulling together, never quite able to escape. Unsure if we even want to.
I attempt to convince myself that he is damaging my emotions, attempt to quit him like a bad habit, and I disappear from his life for a while. I get more than I bargained for when I ultimately collide with another man whose favorite pastime is damaging my skin. I leave him, but not soon enough. Some of those marks are permanent. I can’t decide if my body or my mind is in worse shape.
I return to my Someday Lover, as I always do. Magnets don’t know any better, either; they are simply drawn together. No one ever asks them why.
The first time he sees the marks some other hands left on my body, he asks who hurt me. “Everyone,” I tell him, at once overwhelmed and more honest than I intended, and immediately change the subject. We are brushing perilously close to concern, which from him is somehow both too much and not enough.
When he kisses me, I worry that he’ll notice how tight I’m holding him. I kiss him back because ultimately I’m still his, no matter what my body has been doing lately. I don’t open my eyes until I’m sure the tears are less noticeable. He knows what I’ve done in my absence, of course, but doesn’t ask too many questions. I think he knows he doesn’t have any right.
“Love and sex are not the same thing,” I say one day, too casually, defensive without actually defending myself. When I say it, I wonder who I’m trying to convince. He is careful with me now in a way he never was before, and I find it infuriating and endearing in equal measure.
I know he came from his Queen’s house, I can smell her on him, but pretend I can’t because I need him right now and because I am selfish. I hate that about myself, that I have allowed myself to need anything from this man who can provide me nothing. We have become unintentionally serious, emotional; a deal with the devil that is requiring more from us than we ever intended.
Serious, with him, means that he’ll always put her needs above mine. Serious, for me, means allowing him to do it.
I don’t know if I can explore that yet. I don’t know what it will do to my heart. Mostly I try not to allow this man and my heart to occupy the same set of thoughts, which probably tells you everything you need to know about me.
He kisses me instead of taking care of me, and I wonder if that’s why I love him, if I even do.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and I don’t ask him for what.
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About the Creator
Shea Keating
Writer, journalist, poet.
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Twitter: @Keating_Writes
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