jonmartin + hello my old heart. respectfully i would like to suffer
how did you know i love to suffer, too???? Especially with this song??
just kidding I think i made it a little happy
i did think of an alternate version that I DON’T have the energy to write just now, that will be sad, though.
++++
The thing about a broken heart is that, after a while, you begin to wonder if it’s even worth saving.
Martin has never had luck in relationships, when he’s even tried to have them at all. He never holds it against his handful of partners in breaking it off, because he knows that it’s his fault.
Each time, the wall he builds around himself is a little higher.
He’s a romantic, sure — has never met a romcom he’s never enjoyed, finds himself blushing when reading a confession, dreams of the time when someone might make those fictions a reality for him.
But that’s all they are. Dreams and fiction.
So he builds the wall a little higher after each break up until it’s a silent lump in his chest. He stops watching movies that he used to enjoy, he doesn’t read fiction as much these days. He has to take care of his mom. He has to take care of them both. He has to remember how to just exist, some days.
When he meets Jon, the wall starts to crumble.
“Don’t be stupid,” he told himself on the way home from work that day. “Don’t you even dare.”
Jon, he could tell, was not a… cheerful person. He was not the symbol of romance that Martin used to think about when waiting for his own knight in shining armor to appear (when he was younger, naive, believed in those things).
There is just something about his crotchety old man demeanor that Martin finds endearing. Amusing? It’s a loose thread on a sweater that he can’t stop picking at until he wears a hole away and, well.
For someone so inclined to deny himself anything, Martin has a hard time denying the crush on Jonathan Sims.
“It’s temporary,” he told himself on the way home from work the day he had to admit to himself that he had a crush. “You know better than this.”
It turns out, he doesn’t. Because it doesn’t go away. It just grows, or perhaps festers is a better word. Because Martin can’t stop picking at it, keeping the wound and the reminder fresh.
He doesn’t act on it, because Christ at least he’s not that desperate. It will be a fond idle daydream, he tells himself. He won’t put any effort into making it a thing. This is just how he is, he tells himself, as he prepares tea for Jon. As he jumps to do the little task requested by Jon. As he finds himself moving from idle to active daydreams.
The important thing is, he tells himself, is that it will only ever be one sided.
Somewhere, in the confines of his chest, Martin’s heart remembers how to flutter, and for now, that’s enough.
