What I Would've Told You
We’d just met, and I was so focused on what I had to say, how I had to present myself, and completing the task at hand that when you mentioned a lost love, I heard you but I didn’t see you. Not yet. So maybe I was projecting the hurt I thought you felt, but that couldn’t be right.
It couldn’t be right because when I finally held your gaze, saw you for a second that lasted too long, it was as if I could see into the chasm of hurt you’ve experienced. It was so distinct, so jarring that you looked, not like a different person entirely, but like a veil had been removed, allowing me to see you more clearly. You look like you’ve fought for much and haven’t been given the luxury of rest.
Feeling as if I’d encroached on your privacy, I looked away and didn’t look again.
You’d referenced the lost love as if it hadn’t altered you forever. Maybe it didn’t and I’m being over presumptuous about your past, but maybe we condition ourselves to discuss our deepest wounds in a way that’s palatable and comfortable for others. Maybe sometimes, we have to do that in order to keep going.
Being shown a glimpse of your wounds reminded me of my own, discarded and untouched, and despite my pride, I couldn’t keep neglecting them. There are places that guard memories of him and I couldn’t ignore my avoiding them.
The trail outside of the library where he told me I shouldn’t have worn a dress.
The neighborhood I explored and daydreamed of showing him, but never did.
The fields. The one where we made up ghost stories, the one where he got his car stuck (multiple times), the one where we both could have sworn we were getting arrested, the one where we danced, and he held me afterward, the one where we fought, and the one where I told him I loved him and he said it back.
So many things in life aren’t fair, but the cruelest of them is that I’d hoped and fought for us so deeply, more than anything else then, just for me to have to teach my hands how to hold myself together. Alone. I didn’t have the luxury of being weak and he wasn’t strong enough to end it, so I had to be.
If you and I had been close friends, if I knew that I knew I could trust you, if I wasn’t afraid of asking you to share the depths of your past with me again, and if I was unafraid to share my own, this is what I would’ve told you.