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But also, when I see Beej with other girls it makes me quite sure that, actually, I don’t really know him at all.
And I wonder if I’ll ever feel like that with anyone else again. I wonder if BJ has? Or is it a once in a lifetime thing? How many loves do we get in a lifetime?
and there are all sorts of love in this world and mine is killing me, I think.
because my mind keeps drifting to BJ just like my heart is tethered there
I wonder if that’ll always be us. Are we just those people who always find a way back to each other no matter what? Probably.
Maybe the ship’s not still sinking, maybe it’s sunk. Maybe we’re on the seabed now. Maybe the ship’s wood is starting to rot and all the anchors in the world can’t save us anymore.
He’s the moon, and I’m the tides. When the girl walked out of his room, it was low tide. Pushed me out and away. He stared at me, his eyes a familiar roundness. The way they go every time we lose each other, which is I don’t know how many times at this point. Too many.
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.
I’ve lost BJ hundreds of times to hundreds of different women and he’s nearly lost me twice now to two men I loved more than I meant to.
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.
But all of that feels too personal to say out loud, even to my sister. I don’t want her to know I always assumed we’d just wind back up together and I also don’t want her to know that until this waking moment, I hadn’t realised that maybe we might not.
“I’m done waiting for you to be who I thought you were.”
This happens in a matter of seconds. Why was I crying? BJ. The answer’s always BJ. What does that say about us? There is no us.
“Are you really done with him?” he asks, after a few seconds. Probably not, but I mean what I say genuinely: “I hope so.”
How long had he been waiting for me to cut him loose? I probably should have done it all those years ago, but I’ll worry forever that I’ll never love another person the way I love him.
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.
Leaving him behind was never going to happen passively, I could have told you that from the start. Leaving him would always involve pain, an act of violence, like ripping my heart from my own chest, leaving it on a bench somewhere, hoping for the best until I could make it to a hospital and be patched up, but I don’t think you can live too long with your heart outside of your chest.
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.
it took me so long to stave off the wildfire for him in my belly and now it’s back and it can’t be. But I’ll douse it out however I need to, because I’ll never have him again. This is the end.
I look at him like he’s the stranger he feels like to me now. “How could you do that to me?”
I breathe him in once more. And then I rip him off me. Do it quick, like a plaster.
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?
