Thirteen
Carter
T here comes a physical pain in wanting what you can’t have. It’s a lot like a dagger that’s been plunged into your chest, twisting its way into your soul.
I thought being near to Leah would help me, but it was just hurting me instead. It hurt to refrain from wanting to touch her, be with her, and even open my mouth to tell her I wanted more a second time.
I knew she thought I was crazy. It came out of nowhere to her, but she didn’t know about the countless hours I spent revisiting our time together, realizing how fickle life was. In one blink of an eye, it would be over. We were just dust at the end of the day.
One day nobody would remember us treading the earth, leaving footprints among a muddled sea of others.
We were unmemorable creatures. Fleeting little monsters, born one morning, dead the next. And while it was a depressing as fuck thought to have, it actually put things in perspective.
I wanted to grow old, sharing memories with someone that knew me before I got famous. Someone that didn’t look at me like I was a fucking god. Someone that made me feel like what we had was real.
There was only one person that could do that, and that was Leah. It would always be Leah. She knew me inside and out. Had put up with me even when I lived in my denial, hiding my love for her because I was terrified of what it meant. Terrified of fucking it up. Terrified that I’d lose her because broken love was all I came to know as a kid.
I felt like the clock was ticking. She was going to slip through my grasp, fall for someone better, someone more deserving. They would have a relationship born from promises and commitment. Nothing like the past we shared.
The thought made me squeeze her to me as she lay asleep in my arms.
“I don’t want to lose you again,” I whispered, helplessly. But come morning, I would go back to my empty life and fill it with distractions.
Distractions that were meaningless, surrounded by equally meaningless people.
I held her to me tight. She was my distraction for tonight. The perfect kind.
I could face her rejection, but I couldn’t face her moving on from me entirely. I didn’t want her to fall in love with someone else.
Maybe it was too late, and my hopes were futile.
Maybe it was over before it began.
So, I just held her to me, and pretended it was us against the world. Tonight, she was mine, forever and always. And in some higher dimension, we would always exist like this, with her in my arms, breathing my air, making me feel whole again.
It was strangely uplifting.