Hold Me Under

by Riley Nash

I wish, as I disappear into the darkness, that I didn’t live in a world where the only way not to hurt was to shut everything out and live among your dreams.

Trying to fix lost causes has always been my thing. All of them except myself.

He’s a simple, pure person, made of cats and cookies and little brick houses full of afternoon sunlight. I’m made of mud and broken things, deep water and suffocation.

I hate the relief when he appears, like all the bad ways he makes me feel are the only anchor I have.

Maybe that explains what’s wrong with us—the same endless void that terrifies me calls to him.

deep down I want to know if being hurt by someone who hates you makes cleaner, sharper wounds than the hideous scars love leaves behind.

Or maybe fate is a word people invoke to manipulate those who are desperate for meaning.

“I never asked for this body, the things it needs. I never consented to it. And of all the exquisite fucking hells I’ve known, this sexuality has been at the heart of the very worst.”

“That’s another thing. Are you completely insane? You’ll drown.” He shrugs. “Maybe that’s the point.”

There’s a place I go. The water is emerald green and has no bottom so I can just sink and sink and sink. As long as I keep sinking, as long as I don’t come up for air, no one can reach me there.

“People need you, Ethan. They look for you when you’re not there. You can sleep at night.” I can feel him breathing hard against my chest. “Is that not enough for you?

“Don’t you get it? If I’m not a bad person, then what we have, you and I, it doesn’t exist.” My fingers curl against his skin. I look at his lips, parted, wet with rain, then back to his warm eyes. “Is that what you want?” For you, this is just a detour, a blip. For me, this is everything. I didn’t know what it meant to feel safe until you hated me.

And as angry as I am, I’m also desperate to go to him. I want to be his shelter from the rain. I want to make him look into my eyes and remember that I’m the only one who’s allowed to hurt him.

field trip with Miss Frizzle-Ethan wasn’t what I expected from today.

Lol

“I’m babysitting your child,” I inform him. “I’ll return him tomorrow. He fusses all the time, but I’ve managed to entertain him.”

I needed these few moments of laughter

“Good. He was important.”

She speaks hesitantly, searching for words. “Everyone seems the same to me sometimes, a blur, like looking at the world without glasses on. It’s happening more and more. But I could see him. He felt real. Like you. Like he was always meant to be right there.”

Many people have loved me, with many kinds of love, and that love has been all the worst days of my life, all the darkest nights.

I’ve learned to shut myself off, to do everything that’s asked of me without feeling a thing, and I can’t stop because my body’s only purpose is to be used. But he’s not here to love me, and that promise has filled me with a dangerous hope.

Sexual attraction has always felt performative to me, like I’m acting out the reactions I know I’m supposed to have.

My body slowly went into hibernation, waiting for the day when it might come across something it recognized, that twist and ache, something it was made for.

We were high on the freedom of not being in love. Love has borders, limitations. A million movies and a billion books have charted its course. We chase it because we already know how it makes us feel, and once you’re in love, your only choice is to fall back out of it again.

Hate is intimate, endless, obsessive. Addictively co-dependent. You can’t disappoint someone who believes in the worst possible version of you. You can only memorize them, every hope to break, every vulnerability to tear open, until they’re your everything and you’re their shield against the nightmares that you made for them. And now that I’ve tasted it, I’m not sure I could ever go back, even though I know it’s wrong.

“I was put on this earth to ruin your life,” he breathes in my ear. “Fucking right.”

I had to be good at forgetting, to protect myself, and now I can’t remember anything. I put it here, so that when you’re gone I can rebuild you again every time I forget.

I want to understand the shape of love, not because I think it might be better than hate but because sometimes I wonder, just for a second, if it might be another name for the same feeling.

I’m not angry any more, just tired and sad. And I just hate him the normal way, the dark, possessive throbbing of my heart that makes it impossible to think about anything but him. We didn’t fix anything, but I’m a master at fucking away the ache.

The person you love tears you apart, crushes you, owns you until you turn into whatever they want you to be. I think I’d rather never see you again than have you love me.”

You tore me open and put me back together but you kept something for yourself. You won’t give it back, and now I belong to you.

In the space of a breath, I’m back in a world where I have no voice, no control, where I throw away everything I care about before it’s taken from me. He told me I had time to make him understand, but it’s already too late.

No one comes back for me. Until you.

Sometimes, when you open the door of a cage after so many years, the wild thing inside is more afraid to be free than it was to be caged. All I can do is sit next to the door and wait.

“I want you to stop listening for a second. Ready?” He nods. “Promise you won’t listen?” He nods again, and I can feel his body starting to calm. “I love you so fucking much. It doesn’t matter if you want me to or not because I can’t help it. It’s my secret, and I’ll never tell you.”

He’s all the things that drive me crazy and all the things that lead me home.

And sometimes we say I love you, and sometimes we say I hate you, and sometimes we just exist together without a name, two stars in the universe, and it doesn’t matter because they’re all different names for the same thing, something that will never belong to anyone but us.