I Can Be a Better You

by Tarryn Fisher

Life is a great big thing and you can’t let people ruin it for you.”

We were products of our earliest experiences, replicating the ways we were taught to love, and fuck, and interact with humanity. Some of us broke free of our pasts; some of us weren’t that clever.

You couldn’t fit love into the eye of a needle. You had to just take it in the form it came.

What is love anyway? Most of us had no fucking clue because our parents gave us shit examples of it: prude, nonverbal, stiff; or on the opposite end of the spectrum: chaotic, uncommitted, inconsistent. Or maybe just divorced. So, we flounced around in adulthood, taking notes from romantic comedies … or porn. Love is flowers! Love is grand gestures! Love is trips to Paris hand in hand! Love is her opening her mouth whenever you want to stick your dick inside. Love was whatever you decided it was, and if you’d had a narrow window to peek through, you were really fucked. But then you became a mother, and all of that changed. Love was sacrificing your selfish nature for someone you were more committed to than yourself.

I still loved him. Deeply. How can you love someone who, in their essence, was a miserable, destructive wretch? We love ourselves, don’t we? We’re obsessed with ourselves, in fact. No? What you hate you also value. If you ever doubt me, time your self-hate. You spend ninety percent of your time finding new things to hate yourself for. Obsession.

I wondered if someone who had fire in their soul would have smoke coming out of their mouth.

A person’s eyes rubbed you the right way, or the wrong way.

People couldn’t control who they fell in love with.

People can smell kindness on you even when you act like an asshole to scare them away.

I was selfish that way, wanting people to bend and give me the love I needed, not necessarily the love they knew how to give.

How could I be so stupid? Was I that broken that I put on blinders to preserve something that wasn’t real?

That’s what happened when your heart broke. You remembered the good things first. The thing you’d miss. Then when the anger set in, a new reel started to play. Your thoughts turned from a romantic comedy to a psychological suspense. A genre switch. What a joke. Wedged in-between all of the good memories were dark slivers: fights, text messages, dissonance. You remembered how lonely you’d been feeling, and the dark slivers became more pronounced. They pushed apart the good memories until they stood on their own.

It was a rough realization that the life you were living was not beautiful, but underhanded and secretive. And the person you loved the most was striking you with blows you couldn’t feel yet. He called me in those days. Wrote long text messages

Why would you beg to be with someone who you treated with such indifference?

He tried to make my sin loude...

What type of world was this where the people who you thought loved you the most were the betrayers?

I can make you a part of something great and beautiful and still portray you as the ugly thing you are.