10:
It’s funny sometimes how in all the sick you cover up the point… what you really want. The terrible, the hurtful, the vomit overwhelms the system and you realize that you’ve completely forgotten what direction you’d wanted to go in. So busy cleaning up you just stand still in this massive pit of sick.
You wanted to be fit, to organize; you wanted to appreciate what was left in your life after the purging, after the sacrifice.
So, reach your hand down to the drain. Open the plug, step out of the sick, buy some goddamned fruit and get on with it.
09:
If I’d been honest, I would have clarified that while it was (at the time) a lovely surprise, I hadn’t actually thought of you in quite some time. While I humored your reappearance, I hadn’t missed you. There wasn’t even one moment from the day you threw me off that I actually looked back at the relationship with any longing.
Sometimes, in a tender moment, I would reminisce a bit. I would look back almost fondly on an excursion we had, a trip I’d been part of. But there was always some weeping wound attached. Some slight or humiliation you’d always attach to our time together, and quite frankly, when I realized you were really gone I felt more relief than sadness. You weren’t a good friend to me, you were petty and you were judgmental. Not only judgmental, but jealous and insecure.
I was a whore you had to put down a notch every so often, not because I was really such a slut, but because you felt excluded from my sex. From sex in general. You wanted nothing more than a relationship and a pussy to fuck. I had a pussy, and I had relationships – but when these things weren’t shared with you, you began to hate them. Instead of asking for them, earning them, and adoring them — you wanted to render them inoperable, burn the edges a bit.
We had fallings out. When the comments about my inadequacy or my usery were too stressful to bear I’d go or let you go.
I loved you, but I couldn’t tell you why. Any gestures of romance were lost on me as they never shared the intensity and passion I’d watched expended on other women, and when I asked you want you wanted, you explained that you wanted a relationship. But not because you wanted me, just because you wanted something.
I didn’t want to be someone’s tester, someone’s object to use and try out for the sake of taking something, anything, for a spin.
I tried to tell myself that we were really friends, that after so many years you had more of a reason for knowing me other than that I stuck around and you didn’t have anything better to do…
… but then one day when I’d come to visit, talking of promotions and apartments on an empty stomach, you ate loudly in front of me, hardly nodding to anything I said — turning up the television till it drowned us both in noise and nothingness. When it was time to go, you let me walk through the neighborhood alone in the dark.
When you came back around two years later, you offered a reason no better than boredom. You replaced apology with excuse, and when I openly outlined my expectations — instead of bowing out with grace, ignored my wishes entirely. Continuing in an exchange that was disrespectful, base, and stunningly pathetic.
Hindsight isn’t kind to your memory. You were always this vapid, you were always a little cold. When you gave you gave with strings attached, like a bellhop you waited with your hand out as I turned and walked away again and again — oblivious and delusional.
A jilted waiter, smiling to my face and spitting on my steak.
08:
I don’t hate you because I want to. But life, it never comes down to only what you want.
Sometimes you just want things to be okay. You think of it as a simple request. You start only praying for the minimum. You beg for things like general decency. You yearn for things like apathy and begin to find joy in the general self-absorption that dictates that for the most part, people will just leave you alone.
And it’s funny, when you get your hopes and expectations down to zero how far below it people reach. It’s as if society has dictated that no matter what your expectations, they must always be too high. Reach below your knees? Oh no, they moved the bar to the ground. Reach onto the earth? Oh no, they’ve buried that bar with a shovel.
Start digging.
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Oliver Potts