*Please note that this isn’t a sexy story. There be no sexy shenanigans here.*
I hate you. I hate you because I love you and I can’t tell you. I lost my chance to say it a long time ago. Let it slip through my fingers because I valued security and reliability over unpredictable love. Now that I have age and experience behind me and I no longer fear it, I crave your unpredictability, because I understand that what it made me feel for you was true, passionate love. But now that I know in my heart that I’m ready for it I can’t reach out to find out if it was ever really mine. Because you’re gone.
And that’s another reason I hate you.
You went somewhere I can’t ever reach you and now I’ll never know if what you felt for me was love or if I was just another game to you. An easy target. Someone always within reach who, for all she’d seen and done in the years before you, had retained an innocence that made her heart easy pickings. Was I just another potential conquest? Something to feed into the caricature of you that the world saw…and begrudgingly loved?
As it stands, I know you didn’t love me right at the end. If you had you would have told me. You would have reached out and said before I go there’s something I want you to know. I know you would have because you weren’t one to ever exhibit any fear of the unknown. But you didn’t. You didn’t feel enough – anything? – for me to say goodbye, though you knew fine well that I knew you were leaving the world.
But before then, all those years ago. The wordless conversations we had in crowded rooms. The way we watched each other, silently. The way we found secret spaces to talk around but never about what it was we thought we were doing, the way we both shook then fell into a heavy stillness if even our fingers as much as touched…were you playing with me? Was the dance of approach, retreat and then approach again (getting a little bit closer than before) just a time passing amusement for you?
My head says yes, fool, of course it was, but my heart screams in denial. It refuses to listen to reason where you’re concerned, just as it ever did. I can’t trust my heart, though, and do you want to know why?
Because it loved you.
It still does and for that I hate it.
And for that I fucking hate you.
