"Am I lovable?" I asked softly in the quiet of the night, my eyes heavy with sleep.
We laid naked in each others arms on a cool spring night. Under his covers, he pulled me close as I asked, "I know I'm a lot, but can I be lovable?" I didn't know what kind of answer I was expecting. Maybe the truth, or what I perceived to be the truth, that I was not. Not in the way I believed I should be.
He kissed my forehead and held me tighter and laughed, as if what I had asked was like asking if the sun would rise tomorrow, "Yes, you're lovable" he responded softly, his lips still on my skin. His tone was believable, and maybe it was because of the way he held me so close. Usually we sneak over to each others' place and hold each other. Before it used to be purely sexual. Wild, ridiculous sex. Meaningless, cold sex, that I always wanted to read into. I had always hoped that if it was passionate enough he would see what he lost an came back. But things are different now. I understand that what we have isn't what it used to be, but rather, something more complicated, yet simple. My emotions are not clouding up the room and I see him, and us, for what we are. Close friends.
We aren't together. Any more. We haven't been for years now. Years? Is that right? Yes, that's right. Years. And yet we can't seem to let go, even if we don't know how to hold on. At least once a week we find ourselves embraced at night, holding, loving, thoughtlessly together. There is something perfect about our fucked up and complicated situation. An underlying love that for some reason, we can't seem to break. Maybe it's out of loneliness, maybe it's because we really do care. Neither of us knows, I'm sure, but then again, neither of us care. All that matters is at this moment, I am being held. And though my heart is no longer anyone else's, but my own, and it doesn't flutter and flicker at his touch, there is something to be said about being held by a man you longed for for so long.
As he held me closer, I could feel myself letting go, and tears began to stream down my face. I tried to hold my breath, but everyone knows what it sounds like when someone is crying. No amount of controlled breathing can conceal it.
"What's wrong?" he softly and genuinely asked. His bedroom voice was always my weakness.
For so long I thought he was a cold-hearted asshole. And maybe for a while he was. But he needed to be. I needed to move on. Now, here we lay and though we were laughing and joking, inside I was hurting, but not because of him. Because of other things...things that made me feel unloveable. I wanted to hold in what I was thinking, but it slowly slipped out in tears that streamed down my cheeks. He held me closer, and softly again he asked me what was wrong. I didn't want to talk about it, because it didn't matter. In the end, after everything, none of it mattered, but at that moment I was hurting, and being held only squeezed the words out of me. And though I couldn't really feel it in my heart, I knew he cared. I was just so conditioned to ignore any sign of hope that he would want me back that it was hard to accept him when he was genuinely concerned. It was hard to open that door again and let myself feel for him again. And maybe it was because I knew once the light came through the windows in the morning, and once I left the comfort of his arms, I would also leave his thoughts, and we would go back to be nothing more than good friends who text out of "boredom", or for a late night hook-up.
And I would be back to where I have always been. Alone.
I don't mind being alone. That's fine. It's the rejection that hurts.
For so long I had felt rejected by him. Slowly that turned into something different. We have developed a bizarre friendship that I can't imagine living without. Now I am feeling rejected by people other than him, and that hurts the same. As I admitted these feelings to him, he kissed me softly and pulled me close and as much as I tried to dismiss my feelings as being stupid, he told me, "You can feel this way, it's ok. You're aloud to feel this way. And you're not alone. You have a lot of people who are there for you" and what his words really told me was that he was there for me.
I let the tears stream down my face and fall onto his arm. "I was just trying to get past you," I admitted, softly sobbing. "I have been trying to get past you for so long." He loved the way I loved him. I know no one has ever loved him so selflessly and foolishly and I knew it meant something to him, even if he didn't feel the same.
"I will always love you, even if I am not in love with you," I admitted, my words were muddled and broken, but he heard them perfectly. And though he couldn't say the same back, he tried his best to show that it meant everything to him, so he pulled me closer and kissed my forehead softly. And in the night we lay together, naked, close, vulnerable, and no longer in love like we once were. We both knew that much.
There is a comfort in becoming cold to emotions. There is a sense of relief when you no longer care what others are thinking or feeling or doing. Being able to let go isn't easy, but once you can break those bonds, you find a freedom in yourself that is unexplainable. I like being free from those bonds. I like being content in my own life. It has been years since I have finally been back to my normal self. Maybe it's that I don't have the fear of losing him, maybe it's the fact that spring is here and I am free to run and play in it. Maybe it's that I am finally finding what makes me happy; a journey that has been far from easy.
Or maybe it's the fact that my heart has finally moved on. Maybe not far, but far enough for me to be ok with it.
When the sun finally creeps into his room, I slide out from his warm arms and into the cold morning air, sliding my cold jeans over my bare legs. He watches me and we laugh. Lately we laugh more than usual. I am comfortable with him, unlike the days when I was awkward and nervous and frightened that anything I would do would scare him off. Now I sit at the edge of the bed sliding on my shoes, leaning in to kiss him good bye. And as loving and soft as the kisses are that I leave on his forehead, his closed eyes, and his soft cheeks, I know that there is something missing. In place of it is something inexplicable. Maybe it's just a comfort. Maybe it's friendship. Maybe it's absolutely nothing at all. I avoid looking into his eyes for fear that he won't look back, or even more so, looking back and not looking at me like he once did. He does the same. Nothing lingers like it used to. Instead it is nothing more than a thing we do. We come together, we cum together, then one of us leaves. Sometimes we wait a day to speak to one another for fear the other will assume we like the other, when in reality, though we might on some very small, deep level, we are both just two lonely confused souls too weak to fall in love again...
Making what we have to be nothing more than a fictional depiction of love...
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