Loves Me, Not

He doesn’t love you, he says, and tears fill my eyes, just like in the movies.

When you love someone you don’t treat them like that-- not talking to them for months. That’s s****y. That’s so s****y.

I know, I reply through a demented half-smile, leaning forward to scratch at my ankle, which doesn’t itch. I know. But he said-- 

I don’t care what he said. That’s not love. He was infatuated with you, for sure. He’d sleep with you in a second. But that’s not the same thing as loving someone.

I look at this other young man through the haze of my warbled pain and I think, you want me, and you don’t want me to want him. That’s not all of it but that’s part of it, I’ve figured you out! I’m taking your words at a distance-- from afar-- and they are so cold, and painful still--

I’m sorry, he says, his words drenched in the dimness of the bar. I didn’t mean to jump on you like that.

I have managed to force my tears to retreat back behind my eyeballs and I shrug nonchalantly. It’s fine, you’re right. I mean-- he clearly doesn’t love me.

Still the pipsqueak voice in the back-- disbelieving. So many times over it was said, expressed--

I’m swinging punches and all I’m catching is air, and the air is catching in my throat, making it hard to breathe or talk.

You’ll forget about him soon, he says. Think about the summer. He’ll hit you up again and you’ll think, oh, yeah, he and I used to be close but now things are different. And it’ll be fine.

I let his words string me along and I recoil from the scenario: the unfamiliarity I feel in regard to he who professed his love. And I who reciprocated. All that to--indifference?

Maybe, I say, and he nods emphatically.

It will be.

When he’s halfway through his last drink I ask if we can leave because it’s almost midnight and I have to be up early tomorrow. He says of course and he’s not sober as we run to his car, pushing through the Boston winter wind as it chomps at our cheeks. I ask if he’s okay to drive and he says yes, and I distantly take him at his word. I am dislodged.

He drops me off and ten minutes later is home himself, he informs me over text: we are both okay. I fall heavily and sideways into sleep, fighting against his words and their weight.

The morning is dour, as most of them are, inside me. I wait to rise until I am sure I’ll be late if I stay in bed a moment longer and I dress, eat cereal while perched on the edge of my bed--I never have enough time to get comfortable--and take my first steps into the morning.

I turn the previous night’s conversation over and over in my mind like a baby given a set of keys for the first time. Jingle jangle. What is there to do? What does one do with the crater left by the drumming of professions of love? Craters are unsightly. How do you make it better? Any of it?

The cold of last night has preserved snow on the ground and it is the icy, glinting, hardened kind. The don’t-f**k-with-me snow, the kind that would not protect but injure a body in a fall. I look at it and think about how I’ve become hardened, glinting. I’ve oscillated between seeking his love and spurning the idea of it, all while assuming it was, in fact, there somewhere.

I walk between the treacherous banks of dirtied whiteness and for the first time I say it to myself and I believe it. He doesn’t love you.

Strangely, I feel unfettered. I feel as though I have unfurled a flag. I know exactly what to say to the audience waiting below me in hushed silence and I am ready to say it. I am poised and as I walk I uncurl my spine at the top so I am, in my short stature, as tall as I may be.

He does not love me! And so there is no love to seek.

Cease, and live on outside of him.