I loved winter and loathed summer. Winter was simple and loving; to live through winter you had to be warm. Summer was repulsive: moist and sweat, not the good sweat. The heat made me cranky, made me not want to be touched. It made me want to be left alone and it made me regret many things I said. Summer was loneliness and short nights.
I loved nights more than days too. I loved the fact that a part of the world was silent, for all that’s said was stupid racist extremist lying nonsense.
Now, I like nothing more than the other, I hate them all equally. It all is the same to me. Winters are colder summers and summers are warmer winters. Days are brighter nights and nights are darker days.
I’d still prefer not to soak in my own sweat but I miss tasting hers.
In sleepless nights like this, I think of her. I try to remember what happened? Why is she not sleeping in my arms? Why am I not playing with her hair, kissing her face and waiting for her to open her eyes and call me annoying? I can’t put my hand on what it was, what made this bed feel too big yet too small for me to sleep in?
I survive every night on its own. I fight the bed covers trying to strangle me every time I dare put her off my mind. She’d come while I am taking my last breath and set me free. She approaches me, holds my face and kisses me. My lips burn with where her hands are. She moves them around my body; her fingers dance. She smiles as she sees me needy, burning in desire, wanting to have her, feel her and believe she is there. She stops. She disappears. She leaves me to the suffocating bed sheets again. This time they choke me to sleep.
I bet she is sleeping peacefully, probably next to someone else. I bet she has her leg wrapped around him like she always did with me. I bet she made him tell her a bed time story like she always made me too. I bet she is pretending to like none so that he will tell her another one until she falls asleep. I bet she is wearing her lavender silk pajamas that she loves so much. I bet she forgot to take her make up off.
Why do I know all of this, why?!
Why do I think of her?
Why can’t she leave me alone for fuck’s sake?
She told me that she’ll never be back, she said I left her. She said she is going to get revenge, she said I am going to miss her.
But did I leave her? Why does it always feel like she left me and all what I actually did was choose to stay away from her physical existence? She was long gone.
The words she told me when we parted were stuff she wanted to believe. She wanted to sleep better at night thinking that I left her, that I broke her heart, that I broke her. It’s always easier to sleep feeling like you’re the victim, it’s a sleeping pill to help her get through her insomniac nights when she feels guilty for doing something.
Three months before ending it I felt lonelier than I do now.
She’d be sitting next to me typing something on her phone, I’d talk to her, she wouldn’t answer. She was always too distracted.
She stopped sharing a cover with me, she started bringing another one to her bed.
I ran into him several times on the stairs, I wondered why this man always seemed to be leaving the building when I was going up. Apparently he was only filling for me when I wasn’t there. How nice of him, that man!
She wanted everything at all times. She was constantly bored. She was constantly unsatisfied. She was constantly making me feel like I wasn’t enough. I knew she deserved the best man on earth but God knows I was trying to be that man. God knows my biggest fantasy was asking her to be mine forever, sharing a home and having her overcooked food daily for dinner.
She had her life, she had her friends, she had her routine and hobbies and interests. But I only had her. She was my hobby. Lately, she found time for everything she loved, except for me. Makes me wonder, did she love me?
When I first met her she’d park her bicycle right under my window and start throwing shells at my bedroom window. Shells I used to go to the beach with her to collect. She used to come to my room and wake me up every morning by just sitting there in front of me looking at me so close I felt her breathing. My mother didn’t like her, she was annoyed by her indifference. She’d kiss me long in front of my mum just to upset her. I found that cute, I found everything that she did cute. My favorite times were those when my parents were out of country, she’d come and stay. She’d knock on the door and start taking her clothes off at the door step before I even opened it for her. I watched more than a thousand movies with her, I even liked Gossip Girl for her. I read many of her favorite Jane Austen writings and learned Spanish with her. All of these were desperate attempts to keep the woman I love.
She filled the empty gap I had in my life. I never had a good life until she started being a part of it. And I never had it again after she left it.
I smoke now heavily and I drink twice as much. I smoke sadness into my lungs and drink pain into my system.
It didn’t end because she preferred another man that one time, I knew she often did when she drank too much and got lost on the way home. I was happy I was the person she’d come to have breakfast with every morning and spent most of her days and nights with. At least for a while.
She wanted to learn how to play the guitar then stopped, she stopped attending that Spanish class we both signed up for, she didn’t go to her dance lessons regularly. She got bored. I didn’t know that there will come a day when I’ll be no different than that guitar in the back of her closet, desired for a while then forgotten for good.
The last night we spent together I asked her to tell me a story for a change, so she said:
Once upon a time there was a girl who used to get bored easily
So she took up a hobby
But she kept getting bored
So she changed hobbies again and again
Until she tried all the reasonable hobbies
But what she didn’t know that she had found her hobby all along
Her hobby was taking up hobbies
And that’s what she did for the rest of her life.
Oh, here they come again!
This time I won’t fight them.
Please, choke me to sleep.
