Crushing

by Genevieve Novak

It was just embarrassing. To find out too late that it wasn’t safe to let your guard down. To know that someone had made a list and found your cons column was infinitely longer than your pros. To have tried your hardest and come second place without any competition.

I’d spent so much time trying to fit into someone’s life that I had forgotten to ask how they would fit into mine.

It’s weird when you start to see your parents as people. People are idiots. There’s every chance our parents are idiots. Sometimes I think, who gave these two emotionally vacant narcissists a baby?

The single most underrated quality in a person was silliness. Of all the traits one could possess — empathy, patience, unnaturally high alcohol tolerance — silliness reigned supreme.

I’d tried. I’d held on. I’d twisted myself into the shape of all the things they liked, and it hadn’t mattered. It was the me part that drove them away.

This is what it is to be a woman: to give. To give life, to give support, to give herself, to give in. And in return she receives: contempt, indifference, more requests, his load. She gives until she breaks, a spiderweb of cracks in her porcelain skin, holding still until she shatters into a thousand tiny pieces.

Part of me knew, as my insides turned to ice, that if you had to ask, then you already had your answer.

‘You can’t love someone into loving you back,’ said Kit. He wasn’t looking at me, but out at the bare and brittle wisteria. ‘They just do until they don’t, and then it’s gone.’

The only way to beat the loneliness out of your bones was to connect with people and make peace with your alone time.

‘Why is romantic love the benchmark? Why do you think it’s more meaningful than any other?’

Dogs had it figured out. They knew that the only way to love someone was to throw yourself into it, to dive in and have faith that the love you gave would come back to you.

How strange it was to grieve something you never really had in the first place. It wasn’t the friendship I missed, because there wasn’t one there to begin with. It was the daydream.

How lovely it had been to fall in love a thousand times and live a thousand lives inside my own head, excited and enthralled and safe, always, from the real pain of real life. That was what I missed: delirious, irrational hope. How funny, too, to have broken your own heart.

you couldn’t outsmart getting hurt. Life and people and circumstances and self-destructive patterns would always find a way to hold your expectations up to the light and then smash them into pieces.