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.

If only someone had done this for me. If only. But I don’t deserve the same things as him. 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 pinch my nose and hold it tight shut until the pressure behind my eyes goes away.

I hate that I look for him whenever he’s not here. I hate the relief when he appears, like all the bad ways he makes me feel are the only anchor I have.

No one has ever asked. I’ve never been allowed to make this choice.

He’s always so strong and stable, like he’s anchored solidly to this earth, like he could keep me from floating away.

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

Maybe fate is recursive—the mention of fate can, itself, be fate, signposting the steps our unlikely journeys take through the universe. Or maybe fate is a word people invoke to manipulate those who are desperate for meaning.

But you don’t leave. You pull back the sheet and climb in next to me. No one ever comes back for me. Until you.

I am when I do it. And after a while, I became so needed that I broke myself in unspeakable ways just to hear that praise, and now I have nothing but an empty shell and the knowledge that I should probably gather my courage and end myself.

I just decided it isn’t my fate to save him, even though he tries to convince me he isn’t worth saving, I can’t help myself because I’m not sure there’s anyone else in his life who would.

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.

You can’t belong to someone like me. I’m an infection in your world.

His eyes when he opens them are windows to a hurt I can’t even grasp.

Maybe that’s why I’m slowly losing the ability to function without him.

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.

You’re so bad for me, and I don’t know what’s going to happen if I can’t get free of you.

“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.”

I’m lost to everything but him, a shipwreck on his shore.

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.

He looks so happy it kills me. “I was put on this earth to ruin your life,” he breathes in my ear. “Fucking right.”

“Past regrets don’t count as dreams.”

He looks up at me like I’m God and I finally came to tell him all the secrets of the universe.

You will never forget me. Every one of your dreams will have a ghost that looks like me. Every man you fuck will taste like me.

It’s the shape of you, as best I can make it. 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.

there’s been a weight on my chest that never went away, a constant push to try harder, until I forgot that it hadn’t always been there.

“It hurts too much,” he whispers. “I need to quit you slow, or it’s going to kill me.”

I’m lost, and my heart’s a broken compass that will never get me home.

“I’ll be fine,” I say soothingly, avoiding his eyes. What’s another lie when you’re already drowning in them?

“What do we even have? It’s not natural. The real world doesn’t let things like us survive.”

You always come back for me. Even when I beg you to stop.

Our bodies fit together perfectly, every hill and valley contoured to each other like we were one person who got broken in half before we were born.

and we just let go of everything, melting into the kind of silence that comes when every word in the universe has already been said.

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.

“You’ll meet a guy, someday, and he’ll get to see all the parts you’re hiding from me. And you’ll let him keep you.”

I’m sorry. A lot of people say they were put on earth for the person they love. I always thought I was a mistake, because I can’t love. I was put on earth for no one. Now I know I was put on earth to break your heart. But I hope that’s better than never having it at all. I told you, the water protects me. And if it asks for me back tonight, that’s how it was meant to be. You’ll be ok.

I’m a pile of broken pieces held together by scars that will never heal. How do I make a life when I’ve never had a chance to know what it means to live?

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.

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.