A Less Than Elegant Mess

I toyed with the thought all day. Should I say happy birthday?

And it felt so familiar, so I made the same decision as I did with the last boy. I am the bigger person, I’ll make the move.

I was expecting the same result. That is, I wasn’t expecting a response.

Instead I got a conversation and we’re back where we started not starting anything but unable to stop talking.

I just had to wish you a happy fucking birthday and now we’re both anything but happy.

You’ll think you’re okay.

You still get up every morning, make it to work on time, put in eight hours, and even manage to chat and laugh with your coworkers.

Then you’ll make the trip home for the first time in a while and it will feel like a good decision. You’ll eat all the best food, sit around a fire with your family and laugh until you cry. You’ll even say to them, “This is the happiest I’ve been in so long.”

But then things will start to feel slightly off, like you’re missing something that you can’t even identify. You’ll brush it off, dance with your sister in the backseat of your parents car on your way to a family function.

It’ll feel like everything is fine. 

But then you’ll see your cousin drinking a LandShark and you’re done for, because it’s May fifth all over again and everything that’s happened since then still won’t make sense to you.

And you’ll push through it until your dad says something insignificant and you burst into tears to the point where your mom feels the need to embrace you, and you can’t do anything other than write about your mess of a life in the second person, because you still can’t accept that you let someone in and they let you down.

When someone decides to break your heart, your best friend decides you need a shot. Or a few. And if you’re anything like me, you’ll end up sitting on a tailgate with your guy friend on the verge of tears.

“He doesn’t deserve to know you,” your friend will say as he kisses your shoulder. And you’ll let it go, pretend it’s not happening, because you’re not really there. He won’t remember it tomorrow.

But it helps tonight.

I didn’t really know what a low point was until I found myself crying my eyes out on an air mattress in someone else’s house because some boy I thought wanted to be with me didn’t want to put in the effort.

I was hurt.

I was sad.

Now I’m pissed.

No one gets to make me feel that way.

There’s always that friend that teeters on the brink of something more. It seems some nights you have to remind yourself, This is my friend. We’re not leaving together. Except sometimes you do.

“I’ll walk you home,” he says, and it seems like a good idea. It seems safe. Until you’re on the porch together without anything left to say. So you open the door and try to think of the right way to say goodbye, and any time that passes is pure awkwardness.

So you hug him and make a joke and hope it helps but when you pull back, he doesn’t let go. He wants to kiss you. You know, because this isn’t the first time he hasn’t let go. This isn’t the first night you ended up holding hands, flirting for hours and even cuddling.

But you’re just friends. So you step back, and go inside to sleep. He texts an apology. It isn’t over. It won’t end until it goes too far, until you can’t go back. So you’ll play it careful tomorrow, keep your distance.

But you’ll end up back on that porch.

I see it too often when I close my eyes, that morning I left you shirtless on the porch watching me go. I imagine you watched me until I turned, but I never looked back to check. I was too embarrassed that I declined your offer for a ride home before I realized the rain hadn’t completely stopped.

I didn’t want to confuse things. You had been so nice to me that I’d forgotten at times what it was we were sharing. One night. That’s it.

I didn’t expect you to use the number I gave you that night, but you’ve been doing just that all week. 

So this is what it’s like for two people to want to be together. It’s funny how easy it was for me to forget.

It figures that we live much too far apart for this to work.

“Do you ever miss him?”

Do I miss driving aimlessly, having meaningful conversations in the middle of the night, holding somebody way too tightly, getting kissed in the middle of an argument, dancing in the most ridiculous places, being presented with “This made me think of you” gifts, phone calls that had more animal noises than actual words, using nicknames that grossed everyone out, speaking a language of love and inside jokes, sacrificing sleep for memories, having someone read my thoughts without me saying a word, and knowing that this, this is what love is supposed to feel like?

“Yeah. Sometimes I do.”

I keep trying to remember what he said.
Like I had pretty eyes,
And he liked my dress.
That I probably listened to alternative rock,
And I looked like an artist of some kind.

And then I force myself to remember that he was drunk,
And now he’s gone.

And I chose to live like this.

I don’t regret it. It was a fun night.

But there’s something so cruel about intimate little kisses in the middle of the night from lips you barely know.

And it’s just so easy to feel lonely when you’re spending the night with a stranger.

What you need to understand is that spending two nights (in a row) together doesn’t make this something serious.

And me telling you this doesn’t mean that I don’t want it to be serious.

But most importantly, you should know that I’m probably never going to give you a straight answer.