unlovely

“You don’t care. You don’t love me anyway.”
“I do love you. I’m not in love with you, but I do love you, as a friend. You are a good friend. So you can’t say you’re unloveable because I do love you. I’m just not in love with you.”
“But it isn’t the same. Don’t you understand? Unlovely, and unbeautiful.”


So we sit in silence and I think of all the things you have said, the way you turn away from me in your frustration, the way you told me that if you won the lotto you’d go back and ask her to marry you, the way I told you I wouldn’t be at your wedding to another girl, and then regretted it when you turned your back to me again. You wonder why I am unlovely? Look at the way I love. It is an angry love, a love crawling and struggling and raging like a beast inside my chest, and it is the sadness of love without release that I cannot tell you, that I can never tell you, because I forced you to admit that you didn’t love me back. Because I cannot be happy and honest at the same time. Why couldn’t I have stayed silent, and nourished myself on the fantasy? Instead now I starve on the cold and rocky truth. I cannot seem to allow anything to be imaginary. I had to make you tell me that you don’t love me, and then ask you who you do love. I had to make it so that all the times you snuck the words in and stuck your tongue out at me mean nothing. I had to make it so that I could no longer pretend that you really did love me, that it was only a secret, that you couldn’t reveal it in any other way but to stick out your tongue or carelessly say “Love you,” as you’re closing the door to my car and I cannot respond.


So because I know for certain that you don’t love me, the pain that has been hiding now becomes too close and too strong to bear. The joy and laughter I have allowed myself during the charade now subsides to the tears and fury of the truth. You say, “I will still talk to you, and care about you. I do care about you.” But you don’t see that it is sadder that way, that you cannot build up another façade once you have broken the first and last one down and expect it to beautifully deceive the way it once did. I know you do not love me, and that that is the truth, and that any other lie to be given in place of the pain is just a lie, and that the fantasy will not bring me so much happiness anymore because I know in my mind and my heart the truth of my unloveliness and your unloving.


So when I feel the pain well up and swell inside my throat and stop my breath and burn my insides, I turn to you, and touch you, and remind myself that the fantasy can last as long as I am still here with you, and as long as you do not yet want to leave me behind. I touch your face and your belly and you begin to stir, and I see myself in the reflecting pool of your eyes, see myself as I will be, see myself as I will be if I hold on to this not-love, see myself crying as you walk up the aisle and out the door. See myself as I am, unlovely, and see things as they are, unbeautiful. So I touch you, and I think and I say, “Fuck me,” so that I can forget that you do not love me, “and then fuck me again,” so that I can pretend that everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.


“Who do you miss more than anyone else in the world?”
“My sister.”


And you don’t understand that I love you the more for it, that I love you because you love other people, so I suck in my smoke and my tears and touch you again and say again fuck me, and when your arms wrap around me and you tug at my hair like a dog and you cry softly in the darkness I can pretend that yes, those cries are for me, yes, it is because you love me, and not just what I give to you, yes, I do believe in hope, yes, yes, yes…


And when you ask me, exhausted, quiet, “Can we sleep like this?” it breaks me to have to get up and leave because I cannot sleep, and you crawl onto the bed spread eagled and there is not enough room for me. That is the true truth, the one that is left unsaid, that cold fact that ploughs on without me like a train, that you do not love me, and never have loved me, and never will love me. That I do not believe in hope and yet cannot live without hope. That regardless of the truths that I know, I do not want to believe in them, I want to be happy even if I cannot be honest, that I do not want to leave this place, and I know that you would love me if I stayed. That leaving will not make me happy as it has never made me happy, and that I can only break so many more times before I am broken, and that I wish I could make you happy, truly happy, because that happiness would fill me more than my own not-truth not-real happiness ever could.


I only wish I were a fool, that could be deceived more easily, so that I could continue to pretend and continue to be happy and continue to not hurt, and continue, and just continue, tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. Every truth I come across halts my progress, and so it becomes that I both love and loathe the truth, that it sets me free but sets me free alone, and it becomes that I understand that I will always be this way, unlovely and unbeautiful, because I know too much of the truth and the pain makes it so.


So I sit here awake and know that you are in the next room and that if I asked you would make space for me on the bed, but that is all it is, making space. I know that your best friend was wrong, and that you do not love me, and that I should never allow myself to believe that anyone loves me again, because without love there is no pain, and without pain there is no truth, so without love and pain maybe I can be not happy nor honest, but neither, neither, at the same time.