I fell in love

APRIL

Today, when I looked into your eyes, I knew I had fallen in love. I knew that I loved you and that I wanted to be with you. I knew that as soon as I left your side, I’d be missing you, your fragrance, your smile, your questions… Don’t ask me how, nor when, nor why, because I’m at a loss as to why my heart chose you. Perhaps it was your gaze that had a way of penetrating my soul while we made love, perhaps your actions that set off a multitude of feelings within me that I didn’t realize I was able to possess.

It was today, while sharing that intimate moment in silence, looking at each other, that I realized why my heart beat so fast. I suddenly felt an uncontrollable need to kiss you. I didn’t.

“I love you,” I said simply. You looked at me as if I had just violently slapped you across the face.

“What did you say?” You asked, perturbed, a tinge of irritation in your voice.

“I love you,” I repeated, perfectly aware that you had heard me the first time.

I felt how my heart began to shrink and how a crippling pain was drowning me. I could feel how the tears, impatient, were fighting to jump out of my eyes. I restrained myself. I didn’t want you to see me crying because of your reaction.

“I don’t know what to tell you. Weren’t we going to keep it casual? What happened?” Your questions felt like stabs. I was desperately hoping for a hole to appear under my feet to have the earth swallow me. I could feel an increasingly stifling knot form in my throat. I wished I hadn’t uttered those damned words that I could no longer take back. Why had I decided to say that at that moment? I don’t know. Perhaps I thought you felt the same way, that you were ready to receive my love. Perhaps I imagined you’d smile and say, “I know, me too.”

I got angry, but not with you, with myself for being so naïve. For believing myself the protagonist of one of those romantic movies I grew up with. Did I actually think I was Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman? Or Meg Ryan in ‘When Harry Met Sally’?

“Earth, swallow me,” I thought. “If there’s a God, let there be something to take me out of this situation,” I continued wishing.

But nothing happened, and I felt that I could no longer hold back the tears. I didn’t want you to understand the hurt your reaction had inflicted upon me, so I went to the bathroom, pretending I had to pee; calm, composed, and aloof.

“Are you OK?” You asked casually.

“Sure…” I lied. I didn’t feel that you actually cared. Your question was superficial and trivial. ‘What the fuck do you care?!’ That's what I really wanted to say. But no, I kept my cool and, once in the bathroom, I cried in silence, sitting on the floor with my back against the door. I cried and felt empty, despised, and infinitely small. I didn’t just feel rejected, but also something in my ego had been bruised.

My heart shrunk and I found it incredibly hard to regain my breath. Feeding my lungs with that essential air that now seemed to be fleeing away, drowning me in my own sadness. I was suffocating; more so because I was suffering in silence. I couldn’t scream, I couldn’t make a single noise. My eyes were swelling and I was feeling how my face was being distorted, my semblance had changed. I had to restrain myself. How could I get out of that situation without seeming like I was running away?

I realized I couldn’t stay too long in there, so I washed my face with cold water and did what I could to disguise my appearance. A bit of makeup, happy thoughts…

You were sitting on the couch. You had turned off the tv —fuck!— You were looking at me. You had read me within minutes but hadn’t said anything. Not right away.

“What did you expect?” You asked after a few minutes of silence from my part. “You knew very well what I felt. You knew I was into someone else. You knew that what we had was casual.”

‘How is it so easy for you?’ I thought, unable to utter the words, not allowing them to be free from the cell that was my mind. I could do nothing more than to look at you. My gaze locked with yours, lost in the infinity of your dark eyes.

“I don’t want you to suffer. Tell me, what can I do? Would it be better if we stopped seeing each other?” He continued.

‘YESSSSSS!!!!’ Screamed my mind, but the words, still its prisoners, were able to only exist in my thoughts. I kept looking at you, petrified in the moment when you asked me what I had said when we both knew you had heard me perfectly well. I wanted to change the subject. Cowardly, I know, but an inevitable reaction. I couldn’t win. If I told you that I didn’t want to see you again, I’d suffer because I wouldn’t see you again. If I told you that it didn’t matter, that we could continue seeing each other as we had up to that point, I’d suffer because I knew that while I was making love to you, you were just fucking me. I knew that while I couldn’t imagine myself kissing someone else, touching someone else, you’d have no qualms kissing, loving, or feeling your naked body against that of someone else. The pain was insufferable either way. ‘Better to cut short than to suffer the agony’, I thought. Yeah, sure, in theory, but who the hell has such cold blood? I definitely didn’t.

I was stuck in an impossible situation. When did I become so sensitive? Or was it always that way? Why couldn’t I be one of those cold-blooded women who, when rejected, found solace in someone else’s arms? Who, strong and decisive, they go on, leaving behind that which is futile for them? Strong and able to let go of the past and leave it as such, acknowledging the impossible and letting it go.

Perhaps because I hoped that even though you didn’t love me now, you would sooner or later, because I was the protagonist of my life and, as such, I’d be victorious. After all, hadn’t I always been? Wasn’t it true that the word “no” didn’t exist in my vocabulary? Was it arrogance? Probably. I was young and ready to eat the world. I had shared too much with you, I had given you my heart. I couldn’t comprehend that you had your own will and your own heart, which was completely out of my control. Why couldn’t I understand that? My life would’ve been a different story if I had recognized that. Now, in my old age, looking back, remembering you and the love that I felt for you, possibly the deepest one I ever experienced, I realize how wrong I was in so many ways. Stubborn (read delirious). It’s the only word that better describes my behavior from those years.

SEPTEMBER

I didn’t get away that day. I hid inside myself. We didn’t talk about it again. I pretended as if it didn’t bother me and having you near me became my priority. I forgot to take care of myself and I thought that being away from you would hurt more than not having your heart. How wrong I was!

During the months that followed I felt the burning need to ask you about the other girl, but every time I did, I felt how my heart would shrink a little bit each time. Am I hurting it even more by doing this? I asked myself. Why would I ask you those questions? Was it masochism? Or the inevitable need to add drama to my life? Questions that, to this day, I haven’t been able to answer, or perhaps I have been hiding from.

The mind is a complex nucleus full of circuits, sensors, and all sorts of nerves. Information comes and goes in milliseconds. Besides all that our brains are capable of achieving without the need of our consciousness, sometimes it allows thoughts to enter that come out of nowhere and have no purpose. Thoughts that perhaps tangle our reasoning and that seem so real and possible, that we end up believing them. Therein lies the problem. My thoughts overwhelmed me. I would get attached to them, like a drug addict to his poison of choice. Those thoughts would grow and transform into feelings, and I’d trap myself in a non-existent reality. One of my own making. I vehemently believed that you felt something for me that didn’t exist, but that you still hadn’t realized that it was there. That belief was so powerful that even when you started a serious relationship with the other girl, I would refuse to see it. One could say that I was suffering from chronic delirium. I can’t find any other way of explaining or understanding it.

The fact of the matter is that we continued like that for several months. You were completely detached and I kept on clinging more and more to a fantasy that I was unable to break free from. Even when I felt that the sex was nothing more than sex and that you spent more time paying attention to your phone than to what I was saying. Even then, I was sure I knew better than you what you really wanted.

JANUARY

New year, new life. That’s what they say every year. As if our personalities will suddenly change as if by magic with the turn of the calendar.

As for me, my fictional story was still alive in my mind, even when I noticed you were more distant and with less interest to see me or share your bed with me. I was sure that your relationship with that girl (or perhaps it was another), had gotten more serious, which you’d never tell me because, when you did, it would always affect me too much and that side of me that I so detested would take hold of my reason and my jealous and possessive vein would take over. It wasn’t a nice feeling. In such moments I felt that I lost control completely. So you stopped telling me about the other women. Until you fell in love. Suddenly everything ended. Just like that. It was I who said I couldn’t take it anymore. The whole thing was too painful. I couldn’t love you and share you any longer, even though you had never told me there was someone else, I knew it was so. I left you, thinking that, as always, you’d come back to me. That time you didn’t. It was final.

LATER ON

Pain like that is hard to get over. It took me a really long time to open up to someone else, and it took me a very long time to trust myself and regain my sanity. To find that balance that I had lost when I kept on trying to get you to validate me.

When I think about it, you did me a favor. Continuing with the relationship we had would’ve been the end of me. All the doors that opened in my life after what we had ended happened because I was able to find myself again. I got reacquainted with the person I was before I needed to get validation from so many men (or perhaps I had always tried to look for that external affection, instead of looking for it within myself). I started using my time and energy to work on what I wanted to do with my life. My happiness was in my goals, my dreams, and my passion. I learned to love myself the way I was.

******

We haven’t spoken in many years, but if you ever read this, I want you to know that I am grateful to have had you in my life. I felt hate, resentment, scorn, and all sorts of negative feelings towards you for a very long time. When I was finally able to let go of that burden that I had taken on by myself, I understood that you were necessary for my life so that I could learn to be the person that I became and that I am now, forty years later.

Yes, I fell in love. Perhaps you thought this story was about you. Partly, possibly, but it’s more about the moment I fell in love with myself and with who I am and of who I am capable (and was capable) of being. I somewhat owe that to you.

Thank you for not falling in love with me.

---------------------------

Thank you for reading! I truly appreciate you spending a few minutes of your day reading my stories and entries. If you like what you read and want to support my writing habit, feel free to leave a tip. Thank you!