Day Four

Doubt thou that the stars are fire;
Doubt though that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt that I love. - Shakespeare, Hamlet

I woke up horrified by the sight of my hair, made many hundred times worse by the fact that I now have a giant mirror in my room to confirm it.

After some grooming, however, it synchronised quite well with my pale skin. But despite the fact that it brought out my eyes, I’m beginning to regret the decision. High-maintenance isn’t something I could easily afford. Financial burden aside, I haven’t the mental capacity.

I have voices in my head that talk to me. There’s my favourite one that quietly points out every fatty in the Krispy Kreme queue and makes me run as quickly as my legs could carry me in the opposite direction. There’s the one that instructs me, however unsuccessfully, to study. There’s one that tells me my top clashes with my skirt.

The one that has supernatural perception of boys told me that high-maintenance has never been so necessary. I’ve been wearing the same outfit who knows how many days in a row and my hair has been stuck as a bun on top of my head for so long that I forgot I had any. Until my stupid trip to the hairdresser’s yesterday.

It’s probably right. Looking one’s best is nearly a prerequisite to being single (there I said it, I hope you’re happy). Besides, even in the absence of any potential Edward Cullens there’s always the off chance I’d bump into Jez. And if by good fortune he had remembered me being beautiful, that would probably go out the window the minute his eyes fall on my unkempt self.

Nevertheless it doesn’t change the fact that I haven’t the mental capacity. Being forced to look after my hair is already pushing it. And the fact that Phil and Alan’s 21st tonight pushes me so far off the edge that I seriously considered not showing up. I haven’t been eating. I’m skinny. My skin looks more tired than Mirjana does at the end of the day. I have a permanent look of misery plastered on my face. A pretty dress isn’t going to fix any of that.

Jez had said some things to me last night. Mostly revolving around demanding that I stop talking to him and that he doesn’t like me. I’ve already met my quota of psychological distress for the year. Nothing anyone says or does could make me feel any worse. As a result I found Jez’s remarks nothing but irksome.

At night I lay in bed, fuming. There I was, tucking my hands under my arms to stop myself from calling him to demand an elaboration. There I was giving him exactly what he wanted. It didn’t sit well with me, and despite the fact that I was uncontrollably sleepy, I reached for my phone in a spurt of recklessness and decided to ring him until he either answers or switches his mobile off. I justified my actions. Every damage has already been done. Everything has been lost. There was nothing left to be taken away from me.

The call was short. I had no idea what I wanted to say to him because I banked on him refusing to answer the phone. So I made something up. I have to tell you something, I said, knowing that I wouldn’t have to think of what, because he’d never let me say it. I was right. Send me an email, he said, and hung up.

Oh and he said that he hated me.

I couldn’t stay awake long enough to properly contemplate it. In the morning, I woke up feeling as though the anger had been brewing while I was unconscious. Nobody hates me, least of all the boy to whom I was once everything. And if he claims otherwise, I wanted to know why.

So in spite of myself, I called.

“What do you want.”

We stumbled around with hostilities on his behalf morning-mumbles on mine. Eventually he told me what I had called to find out.

“I hate you,” he said. “I’ve hated you for awhile. You’re boring. You’re immature. I dreaded seeing you. I dragged it on because I felt sorry for you. I hurt you because it was fun. I wanted to see you do all those immature things you do.”

And even though it didn’t make any sense at all, I believed him, at the same time marvelling his acting. Nobody could say “I love you” to someone they didn’t love with such conviction. I wanted to yell at him to go to take up acting and slam the phone into the wall, but instead I pointed out that either he’s lying now or he was lying ten minutes ago when he said he didn’t want to hurt me.

He told me I can go figure out which one it is.

“It’s not a puzzle,” I said, “It isn’t about what I want or don’t want to hear, and it isn’t about what would hurt me less or hurt me more. It’s just the truth. Tell me the truth.”

He paused. “Do you really want to know the truth?”

“Are you going to tell me the truth?”

“Do you want the truth?”

“Yes.”

Okay, I thought. He’s going to tell me he doesn’t hate me, but that he doesn’t have any other feelings for me either. He’s going to tell me he has moved on. He’s going to tell me he’s interested in someone else. He’s going to tell me he’s gay with Craig. Sometimes the word “truth” sounds far more threatening than it has the right to, and every microsecond that passed before he spoke again my mind fabricated a hundred more horrifying possibilities. My certainty wavered. I wondered if I really wanted to know, after all.

His voice was suddenly quiet. “I love you. I love every part of you.”

And then I started crying.

Letting something go to see if it comes back. This isn’t really like that, is it.

More like, marinating the chicken before it bakes.

Day Three

Whether Jez doesn’t want any contact with me because he can’t contain his feelings every time we talk or because he hasn’t any more feelings for me I’ll never know.

He might not realise it, but he has switched between the two stories so often that I’ve wondered whether they’re both false, and that the true reason was something else entirely.

I was never a mystery. I don’t want to be with Jez because I’m not a sadist, but all my feelings, my stupid, stubborn feelings for him remain exactly as they’ve always been. Except there’s a little bit of hate, but that’s only to be expected, isn’t it?

I’ve read stories about people who have had one love they never managed to forget, and I can’t think of anything more frightening than falling into this category because of Jez. Nevertheless I know that I’m young, and that there is probably a good chance I’ll remember all of this some years (or months, I hope) into the future with a smile and not a hint of stabbing pain in my chest.

I’ve been in love before. At first glance it’s obvious to me that I’ve never loved anyone like I loved Jez. But imagine breaking your arm. The pain is excruciating and you spend months wearing a cast, partially disabled and deprived of all of the two-armed activities you’ve taken for granted. Then once the cast is taken off and you’re on a beach playing volleyball, someone asks you how painful it was to break a limb. You say, “it wasn’t that bad”, because you’ve already forgotten.

I rack my brains, but just like the distant memory of a broken arm, simply remembering the pain doesn’t compare to actually feeling it. I can feel my love for Jez. I have only a memory of my love for Eddie. There were no parameters for comparison.

My friend had reminded me that Jez himself proved how easy, how spontaneous and how unexpected meeting someone could be. It’s never where you look, and it’s never what you’d expect. Right now I don’t harbour the thought any longer than it takes to write this paragraph. Right now it doesn’t matter to me.

It’s funny that I miss Jez for such different reasons than I had before. For unexplained-but-most-likely-hormonal reasons, the last break-up left me craving sex. I missed every minute we spent in his bed, it drove me absolutely crazy. After the previous break-ups, I craved the little physical things. Cuddles. Kisses. Grinning at each other like a couple of silly idiots.

Right now, it hurts the most that I can’t crawl into bed and call him to tell him about the trivial little things that happened during my day. I can’t tell him about the most recent stupid thing I’ve done and make him laugh. We can’t discuss NDS games. We can’t make jokes at each other’s expense. We can’t talk ourselves sleepy about absolutely nothing at all.

I miss my friend.

Day Three

“In the beginning, there was nothing at all but the moon and the sun. And the moon wanted to come out during the day, but there was something so much brighter that seemed to fill up all those hours. The moon grew hungry, thinner and thinner, until she was just a slice of herself, and her tips were as sharp as a knife. By accident, because that is the way most things happen, she poked a hole in the night and out spilled a million stars, like a fountain of tears.

Horrified, the moon tried to swallow them up. And sometimes this worked, because she got fatter and rounder. But mostly it didn’t, because there were just so many. The stars kept coming, until they made the sky so bright that the sun got jealous. He invited the stars to his side of the world, where it was always bright. What he didn’t tell them, though, was that in the daytime, they’d never be seen. So the stupid ones leaped from the sky to the ground, and they froze under the weight of their own foolishness.

The moon did her best. She carved each of these blocks of sorrow into a man or a woman. She spent the rest of her time watching out so that her other stars wouldn’t fall. She spent the rest of her time holding on to whatever scraps she had left.”

Two nights ago he mused that somehow I don’t stop breaking his heart. Jez, what do you know about broken hearts?

At night I’d wait for my parents to retire into their bedroom to watch TV. Like I have a schedule for what time I could cry.

I have only so much time before I fall asleep, only to wake up next morning to the disappointment that I didn’t quietly die during the night.

Day Three

I’m walking around the house in an old tee.

It’s been a long time, and I’m not sure whether this is going to end in regret.

I walked by the hairdresser, paused, and asked whether I could browse through their hair art magazines.

When the girl’s scissors snipped off the first strand, it was too late to turn back.

I’m afraid of change. I like to buy sushi from the same place. I wear an old pair of ballet flats on the brink of falling apart. I can’t bring myself to buy a bag that isn’t tan, or a dress that isn’t cream. I haven’t taken off my ring.

But sometimes life changes whether you like it or not, and when it does, you could either struggle to keep everything the way you’ve always liked it, or you could let the current take you somewhere new.

When my friend and her boyfriend ended their long-term relationship, she got a tattoo.

I got a haircut.

And as if that wasn’t anti-climax enough, it was a fringe. A subtle, sweeping fringe. When I got out of the hairdresser’s chair there were about ten strands of hair on the floor. To somebody else, I could have walked into the salon, flipped through their magazines, threw my $20 onto the counter and left looking exactly I had before I went in.

I may have a tattoo one day, but as I always said – baby steps.

Day Three

Amidst all this doom and gloom is the dim acknowledgement that my 21st birthday is slowly creeping up.

I try to push it out of my mind. My birthday is just less than a month away. I don’t know how long it’s going to be before I speak to Jez again but somehow I doubt it will be soon enough for him to wish me a happy birthday.

Jez’s birthday is six days after mine. We made plans, changed plans, made them again, and gave them up. In the end he said he’d like to be with his family on his birthday. I was already starting to pout when he laughed and told me that “family” included me.

And now, we’re trying not to speak to each other. It’s so hard for us to be friends without succumbing to something more.

Somewhere up there, a greater being must be sitting on a cloud with a bowl of popcorn, laughing at the way two people try to untangle themselves from each other’s lives.

Day Two

At the end of the day, I’m sure of one thing – that every cell of my body is craving him.

Day Two

It takes talent to describe this in words. Talent I may not have.

But I’ll try.

I love Jez. So much that it can’t be explained. So much that I can’t breathe. So much that I would bet anything in the world that if I died right this moment and forensics cut open my chest, they wouldn’t find a heart. My heart is with Jez. On the bottom of his shoe. Inside his trash.

I know that I can’t be with him. Sometimes I thought I was a bit of a masochist for staying with someone who hurt me the way he did. Being with Jez was like drowning. Struggling towards the surface, gasping for air before being pulled deeper into the water. I think of all the nights I spent awake, all the hours I spent crying, and realise that I spent far more time being miserable than happy. I know I deserve more.

Yet I never left, because I knew that without him, I would be exactly as I am now. Bleeding. In pieces. I didn’t stay with Jez because I wanted to be happy. I stayed with Jez because I was afraid to shatter. Jez would have broken me, piece by piece. I wanted to stay a little more whole for a little longer.

Martin said in a fit of cliché that the rain is always followed by the rainbow.

How many times must it rain, before the rainbow loses its worth?

Martin said in a fit of cliché that time will heal my wounds.

And what good would time do if I bled to death first?