To the First Boy Who Loved Me: A Recollection of Circumstance
I remember loving you. Like one knows their hearts beating. Like you feel the blood rushing in your ears and the accelerated rhythm pounding against your ribs. I knew loving you like one knows an adrenaline rush, like anxiety freezing your body, like the moment you see the ground before the free fall. I remember it felt like that. I remember I knew my love for you like I've never known anything. There was one thing I was certain of in the whole world. It was you.
Today I can say I'm certain of a handful lot of things, so many that the version I was then could not believe it if I had a way to tell her. I just remember loving you. I remember you. I remember us. Oh what a great thing we were. I wish we could've been forever. I wish I could've grown old by your side. Now I just remember. I feel the love I remember but it's trapped in the ashes of a blaze that's been long put out, scattered by the wind. Why did we have to go and die? I wish I could have remained frozen in that period of time, endlessly with you. What to do when a love dies but it does not? This ache might haunt me forever.
I carry you around like a shackle, every step I take is with the awareness of something slowing me down. These weights I never learned to put down because no one ever told me I could. I used to be a hyper-independent child, many things I learned alone, and the procedure might have been wrong but my results looked similar enough from others to not worry about it. So no, no one ever noticed I was stacking things up, never letting go of them, and if they did no one knew how to help. Well, that's what I like to think, better than the idea of someone noticing and ignoring me.
It's easier as a child, when I was small the issues were small too; they were not problems yet. But you know how in administration and economy they differentiate between big and small companies? how a start-up cannot be handled the same way as a megacorporation not only because of the size but because they are intrinsically different? Yeah, the same happens with emotions when you grow up, with relationships. The pain I didn't know how to name, the hurt I never acknowledged and the things I went through that I never really felt were all shoved in boxes and stored in the dusty attic of a house big enough to be forgotten about.
My metaphors are all over the place, sorry, another thing I never taught myself to do well.
But I think you get what I'm getting at. I grew up and the same mechanisms I used to get by in life became obsolete because they were too simplistic to handle teen-age problems. When the adult problems came the system was in shambles. And at some point the attic door got stuck because it was so full that if I tried to open it the landslide of trash threatened to bury me. So I filled a spare room, and then the shed in the garden, and the downstairs bathroom; I feel like the basement was always full. I don´t know if you know how it is to live in a hoarder's house, with towers of things closing in, with dirt and vermin. You learn to tread carefully through something that was meant to be a safe place. I was taught to cook and clean because my mother was not going to raise a useless thing, I was never taught to take care of the house I lived in.
I got a little carried away, I liked the house analogy, even though my real house growing up did feel like a home. You know what they say about kids in houses on fire though.
When I met you I was not even aware of things, you know? I thought everything was normal, was right, was common: the way I felt, how I was treated, the way I thought of myself. I really fucked it up my dear. I'm sorry. I'd like to think I'm better now, but it's been years and it took me a long time to realize what was really wrong and start trying to fix it up. So you can say good riddance, you can curse our history, you can spit on our past. I won't blame you. I'll just carry our story in my heart and my mistakes will forever dig in my back, the weight of the could have beens will forever slow my steps and my world will halt every time I cross your path, but I won't stop. Maybe someday I'll find a key, maybe it will erode to a bearable weight. Maybe this love that is not dead will die its final death and I will finally just remember it. Maybe I can finally put it down: lose you without losing. Right now even if i could i do not want to. Some day I'll learn, I think. Something else will come around and maybe I'll finally have the tools to do it right. One day I'll have the tools to hold something valuable in my hands without tearing it apart. I might be able to forgive myself then.
dededos
theartofmadeline
turnnoffyourmind
janainaart
stormborns
origamiaround
ellievsbear
