You Were My Fiction Until You Became Real

I get scared.

I get scared, and it is not your fault. It is not your fault, and yet I cannot help but blame you for all the uneasiness I feel around you.

Do you know it used to be so easy?

You didn’t have a face back then. You were never confined to a certain size. Your height was never constant, and the shape of your toenails to the hair on your head was never the same.

You were so carefully constructed by me.

My mind is a dangerous place.

Anyway, what am I even supposed to do now? You are no longer my fiction anymore. Do not get me wrong—you are still my fantasy, but you are no longer something I can shape.

The thing is, now you exist, and existence ruins things.

You can look me in the eyes now. You have done it so many times.

Do you know that you have an obnoxious habit? You stare directly into a person’s eyes while you are talking to them. And ask me if it wrecks me, and I will answer you with a yes.

I never expected my feelings to have a face.

But then you arrived.

And with your arrival, you took away a lot of things from me.

You stole my power to wrap you in any situation I wanted inside my head. With your arrival, you took away my ability to imagine my countless rendezvous with you. You snatched away my greediness to keep you hostage in my imagination.

Look, I feel so guilty that I can’t even breathe. Because now there you are, just a few feet away from me in the canteen, sipping your morning coffee while I still have you in my damn head, boating with me around Venice.

How pathetic.

And somehow, that is not even the worst part.

Sometimes, I look at you, and I frown endlessly. Because now you are awfully human, like the rest of us.

You were just not a human in my head.

You were my mighty idolization. My magical force. And though the human you do carry something beautiful within you, it is nowhere near the soft divinity you once were inside my imagination.

Now you need validation sometimes. You need reassurance. You need to know your place in someone’s heart before giving them yours completely.

You distance yourself when you do not feel wanted.

But how do I tell you that in my head, you were always persistent? In my head, you always understood my fear of acknowledgment. You never left. You never hesitated.

Now you look past me.

Do you know there was a world where everything between us simply had to continue?

Everything between us was so beautiful because nothing could ever fail. I would never be looked past by you there.

I never had to wonder if I was too much, or not enough. I never had to wonder if I would lose you, or if I would scare you away.

In that world, you always stayed turned toward me.

No matter what happened, you remained.

I did not have to be chosen—you were already there.

And because I held the shape of everything, nothing ever left.

As everything simply stayed, I was never scared.

But then you came into existence and brought with you an endless row of fears.

Now I fear being left behind.

I would be able to see you every single day, but I fear it will only be from very far away.

You brought the fear of rejection with you. What if you no longer let me keep you as my willing hostage anymore? What if you stop orbiting around me completely from now on?

Do you know you make me cry?

You make me cry without even having to do anything, and that’s the worst part because it is so humiliating.

If only you were cruel to me.

If only you hated me.

But the truth is, you probably do not even think of me.

Maybe you do not even know me.

Tell me, how is it possible that somehow loving you has turned me to unlove myself every single time?

It was supposed to be something beautiful, was it not?

Loving someone so much that your heart beats irrationally. That your neck turns red in their gaze, and music plays somewhere in the background.

So where did this go wrong?

Now my heart beats so irrationally that it pains me. My neck turns so red that it burns, and the music still plays, except now it eats me up. It is no longer comforting.

You continue living your life while I remain in the background like a side character, never important enough to be noticed.

And perhaps that is the cruelest part of it all.