Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
HAPPILY EVER BEFORE
Arden
"Hey Stella, me again… I thought I would catch you but I guess this is just our life now…"
Not that long ago, she wouldn’t have been a phone call, she would have been here in bed with me as we snacked our way through a debrief. I guess this also gets filed in the category of ‘relationships you leave in college dorm rooms.’
The voicemail hangs on a telephone line that seems to have been severed somewhere around the same time we packed ourselves into the last boxes of our college youth.
I don’t know that she would admit it so bluntly, I don’t think she would say there’s anything wrong. But I also don’t think she would know. Which in and of itself, proves the point. Our messages just go into the same black hole where we pick them up, but each time, they are just a little bit less than before.
Now I lay here alone and reach for my latest read. Its predictability is a comfort as the softness of my salt lamp casts soft shadows across the wall. Reading as the main characters struggle through their middle to get to their happily ever after. Maybe that’s what's happening here, too. Struggling through the middle. I just didn’t think it could be so lonely.
Loneliness is the most dangerous type of hunger. It means that anytime anyone shows up with a hot meal you let them in thinking they will feed whatever is missing from your soul. And sometimes it does, for a time. But it also means you're eating a lot of things that maybe you don't really want in the hopes it will sustain you.
I wasn’t running from him when I left the bar, but standing there tangled with him, the pit in my stomach felt like fear. It wasn’t going to be the happily ever after kind of love, love stories don’t start with a public argument and definitely not a public bathroom.
I know myself, despite how much self-awareness I’d tried to pack away in recent years, I know how easily I could fall into a relationship. Just about as easily as I jump out of them. There was a time I wouldn't even call it that, pretending that in some way casually dating excluded me from heartbreak. But it didn't.
I stare at my phone in the dark, his message glowing accusingly on the screen. The timestamp mocks me, three hours and counting. He texted me immediately, asking when he can see me again. The blue light illuminates the carefully arranged photos on my nightstand, memories of simpler times when I wasn't afraid of my own desires.
But here’s the thing, I’m fucking terrified.
It’s like standing in a room full of gunpowder and feeling the static electricity crackling at my fingertips. One wrong move, one spark, and we will both go up in flames. The scary part isn't that I might get burned, I’ve been burned. And while those scars don’t exist topically in a way for anyone to see, I remember the pain of them.
The thing that scares me most is that part of me wants to strike the match just to watch it happen.
I've prided myself on control. It is part of the reason I started dating as I did. Looking for consistency. Preferring to keep myself in labeled boxes and tucked away from the risk that goes along with all that.
But the way our bodies gravitated toward each other in that booth, it wasn't just attraction. It was physics, chemistry. The kind of reaction that changes the molecular structure of everything it touches. His hand on my thigh wasn't a touch, but a catalyst.
It’s not the possibility of getting hurt, but the certainty that this thing between us could consume everything in its path. My carefully laid plans, my professional ambitions, and after listening to his brother lay into him about his life, it would burn up what sounds like his own hard-won independence. All going up in flames burning away in the inferno of whatever this is.
I feel so far from who I was when I first moved to this city. In many ways I am. In others though, I’m just a few blocks from some of my best and worst memories. The intersection of them is the most ironic of all.
Graduating college was supposed to be liberating. But it just reset the goal post. How bullshit is that. My entire life has been a series of marathon finish lines and the second I break the ribbon, I can see a new one off in the distance. And again. And again. Until when? I thought I had slowed down and focused, but I didn't. I just ended up suppressing myself in a way that made navigating my life feel like I was trying to run through mud when there was perfectly good pavement if I just looked up.
I look up and out the window scanning the glass for invitations into other people's homes. Okay okay, never really invited, but lured . Every one of them is in darkness. The only story I’m crafting now is a memory, not a dream.
The moment his lips first landed on mine, how his fingertips felt against my skin, how they felt inside of me. I sink into the collection of pillows on my bed, and slip my fingers under the band of my underwear.
My teeth dig into my bottom lip wishing it was him.
And that's why I know, for my own self interest, it can’t be.