Breadcrumb #592
ILANA ROTHMAN
He tells me near nothing else, and I am not surprised.
The ignored messages are their own answer, but the unopened ones at least give me something to wait for. The terrible intermittent reinforcement of it all. The occasional trivialities and tormented crypticisms I hear from him are just enough to keep me from giving up hope entirely.
I near always respond right away. I lack a “play-it-cool” bone in my body.
When I tried to explain this feeling to my Uber driver he called it love.
For so long I’ve been the girl who writes about boys, and for so long he’s been the boy, and yet he is so much more than “the boy”. If he were only “the boy,” some abstract figure that I have latched onto for the sole purposes of enhanced artistic expression, it would have been far easier to keep my hand off his shoulder.
If this were just about “winning” I wouldn’t have been so worried when I saw how depressed he was, and I wouldn’t still be so worried now. If this were purely a matter of mind rather than heart, I wouldn’t have gotten drunk and cried over him at a friend’s wedding the weekend after I last saw him. And then cried again, sober, when that goddamn Hamilton song came on shuffle. The one where Angelica realizes that she will never, not ever, be ‘satisfied,’ because her one true love will never be hers. If this were just about looks, talent, intelligence, any one particular characteristic, I wouldn’t have felt more euphoric running through a grocery store with him than I did making love to someone else.
“If this were purely a matter of mind rather than heart, I wouldn’t have gotten drunk and cried over him at a friend’s wedding the weekend after I last saw him.”
I confess, I use his more or less continual state of psychological unrest as an excuse to hold onto my largely inexplicable feelings for him. I refuse to relinquish them despite all rational evidence that I ought to, despite having been actively told to, so that they remain there, shimmering as ever, in the unlikely case that he should ever want or need them.
You may mistake this sentiment for a self-sacrificial or even masochistic one but it is not, or at least not entirely. For me, wanting to keep this non-thing thing alive is actually quite selfish. Because for however un-returned it has always been, this force drawing me to him has long ceased to feel as if it is weakening me or corroding me. The pain of it all has burned off with time and has left quite the opposite. It feels beautifully familiar. It feels like a kind of life force, even a superpower. The ability to tap into such raw passion feels like strength. It feels like stability, it feels like a talisman; like some pure and sacred thing in this vile excuse for a world.
So, in a way, I will admit, yes, to continue feel for him is often a highly specific way to continue feeling the inarticulate longing that might be better directed towards the people who properly care about me, or even perhaps the universe itself.
But I still wish he would tell me more.
There are a thousand other reasons a thousand times more plausible that I’ve ended up a mere afterthought to him, to be always kept at an arm or two’s length (my insanity, my clinginess, my impulsiveness, my insanity, my invasiveness, my insanity, my selfishness, the last girl, my insanity). But if, ever, he even suggested that the thing that stopped him from confiding in me was that he wouldn’t want to hand me the burden of his despair, I’d tell him that that was madness. And I’d tell him that I’d rather hear the worst, than know nothing, hear anything at all.
I’d tell him about how I’m anchor-less, and just what I’d give for him to come and weigh me down.