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I down and out love her in all spectrums of light, even the absence of it.
Because loving him is the same thing as tossing the keys to my heart to a valet without a driver’s license. He’ll drive me off a cliff.
I scowl up at her, equal parts annoyed and confronted. “I don’t need a psychology lecture, Bridge.” “No, Beej.” She gives me a pointed look. “You need a therapist.”
Nothing, and then everything. Everything bleeding out everywhere, dying right here on a bed of peonies with the love of my life on the other side of the room with a man who isn’t me, who’s actually fucking probably finally worthy of her and the bleeding out starts to feel too real.
Is love for everyone wordless exchanges and a million memories that fuck you up to the bone?
“I read it every year.” “I know,” she says, flicking her eyes, annoyed. “What’s it telling you this time?” “That I’ve been tamed.” “By whom?” She blinks and I know she knows. I look over at her, my eyes steadier than my heart feels. “By you.” Her cheeks go pink and I sniff, amused and pleased.
I think about kissing Magnolia Parks more than I think about anything else, literally in the world. It’s my go-to thought when my mind has a minute to spare.
Because BJ and I are unquantifiable. It’s the nuances of all the ways we love each other and have loved each other and keep on accidentally loving each other and it’s the intricacies of our threads we’ve knotted together and it’s the secrets we know about each other and it’s that one broken heart we share.
“Are you sad?” I ask. She wrings her hands. “I’m lots of things.”
Fucks me up worse than it does her because she can’t see her own face when she’s crying but I can. Those fucking emerald eyes. I’d sell my liver on the black market to stop her from crying, sell everything I own, rip my heart out of my own chest—but I think I’ve already done that.
“When was the last time you actually kissed?” I scrunch my face back as I pretend to try to remember, like the last time we kissed isn’t just singed into my memory, like I don’t drag it out like my favourite sweater every time I have a minute in my brain to spare.
Our eyes lock. She’s the deer and I’m the wolf and there’s a massive truck headed right for us in the middle of a dark night.
Then I kiss her, slowly at first… slowly like how you drink a top shelf whiskey—feel it in your mouth, let it roll around for a couple of seconds before you go back for more. Bask in the flavour of my old, always love. Slowly, slowly, and then more. I kiss her deeper and her breath gets caught in her chest, and I remember how much I used to love it when that would happen, so I do it more. We’re like a broken faucet where the water’s drip-drip-dripping out and then full force—but we’ve always been like this.
All I know is that kissing her felt like a shower after a particularly brutal rugby game.
I’ll die in her arms or at her doorstep trying to get back into them, I don’t give a fuck.
Trying to calm me down—succeeding at it too—because her eyes have got a shock factor. If I look at them properly any time it’s like someone pushing me into a river. I go under real quick, gotta kick my way back up to the surface, body chokes up, I’m just treading water.
Forget the metaphors about the jumper cables and the sparks, we’re all of them and none of them—Parks and me. It’s in the fucking stars.
hope we’ll always find our way back.
I’ll love him ’til I die, love him ’til it consumes me whole and kills me dead—so maybe love doesn’t conquer all but just some. Because all is vast and love is so varied, like light in a prism; if you move it around a room, depending on how it catches, it changes. It means different things and there are so many different things love can be to people.
I know that some love is beautiful, and some is freeing, some unravels you, some love poisons you, some blinds you, some betters you, and some loves break you in invisible ways that no one else knows about until you have to stand up and the weight of your love crushes your bones. And as I watch him scream “fuck” again and again in a back alley while he punches a wall, I wonder if maybe I accidentally made Christian love me like that?
“Do you need the whole fucking world to be in love with you?”
“Do you have any idea what it’s like to be in love with someone and have to watch everyone else be in love with them too?”
Of course we’re going to work, even if I’m a round peg and he’s a square hole—I don’t care, I’ll shave down the edges of myself to keep him.
I start to wonder how many people in your lifetime do you get to love how I love her? Can’t be that many. How many loves do you get?
“What am I to you?” I lean back into him, pursing my mouth at the question. “The oxygen mask”—I glance back at him—“that falls down from the ceiling of the planes.” He hugs me tighter. “That’s good enough for me.”
“The only thing she’d find categorically unforgivable is you dying.”
Fated: that’s what I thought we were. That no matter what happened—how far we went, how much we hurt each other, that we’d always sort of find our way back to each other.
At the altar of the tree, I make a thousand soundless prayers and offerings, beg whoever’s listening to align our stars and let him be who I thought he was. If he can’t be that, I pray, may I be free of him and not have it kill me. But he is worth dying over and that’s the part that gets me, I guess.
“I’ve had the best life being fucked up by you.”
If BJ’s water to me, Tom is wine. I don’t need him to survive, but I love him anyway; he tastes good, makes me feel better, makes me feel braver.
Remember how this feels. Being in here, in his arms. Remember how it feels to be folded up inside his chest, how it feels to have his arms pressed against my back, where my legs fit between his, how he ducked his chin a little so I can live under there, remember all of it because this is the last time.
Can you die from a broken heart, do you know? And if I did and they cut me wide open, would I bleed loving him? When they lift my heart out of my chest cavity to weigh it, does it weigh the same as his top lip? Is his name carved into my third rib to the left? Bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh. He’s killing me. Loving him is killing me too, and I’m afraid because how many loves really, do you get in a lifetime? How many chances do you give it before you let it go? I’m letting it go.