You Taught Me A Softer Way To Love. Which Is To Say I Have Always Loved Like Wildfire. Always Loved Vicious.

You taught me a softer way to love. Which is to say I have always loved like wildfire. Always loved vicious. All or nothing. Overwhelming and unbearable and so hard it hurts. Always loved a war of desire leaving my heart a ravaged battlefield with thick scar tissue in the shape of words they never said. But we burnt out. Which is to say I fell out of love with you in the summer sun in the middle of a movie theatre parking lot and it had nothing to do with you. And I did not realize this for years in the aftermath of this heartbreak. It had nothing to do with you. For you had always been you. It was me. For it is always me and the moment I am disillusioned regarding exactly what I am deserving of. Regarding exactly what you are offering and what I had misinterpreted your open palms and open smile for. Which is to say I fell out of love with you to save myself. In an act of self-preservation. To keep loving you would have killed me. So I stopped. Which is an oversimplification of the process of withdrawal but I did. I fell out of love with you. And I am better for it.

Which is to say when I did, touching you ached less. Your name in my mouth didn't sting so much. Every time you talked about someone else it never cut deep enough to leave a mark. And then it stopped cutting at all. And then I started being happy for you. And now, all this time later, I suppose when I call you my friend I mean it. Which is to say I never text you first anymore and it isn't even on purpose. Which is to say we talk when we have time, usually when you are home from school for the break, and I laugh like renewal, but never with enough joy that it threatens to rip my seams. Which is to say I have not fallen in love with anyone since you but I'm okay with that. I know I could. Which is to say I do not rearrange plans when you call and I do not particularly care about seeming intelligent to you anymore. Or beautiful. Or talented. Or worthy. I don't worry about keeping you coming back. Because I know you'll return for us eventually. And we'll pick up where we left off. Like we cannot help but meet again where you last left the person I used to be.

But every time we are together for more than a handful of moments I am in love with you again. And my heartbeat syncs with yours. And when you look at me I want you to keep looking. And when you touch me I want you to keep touching. But you never do. And I am practiced in this. So this time you walk me all the way home and it doesn't even get my hopes up. This time you sing to me at my doorstep and I do not flinch. Remind myself it is not your fault your kindness works like this. That this is just who you are. Because I will walk inside and peek out the glass for you to look back and you won't. And I will remember in the reflection that I am no one special to you. And I will fall out of love again, just like I have done a dozen times before with you. And I will go upstairs and take a shower humming the lyrics to the song you last played me and when I step out of the stream of water, my desire will be washed down the drain. And I will cease loving you until next time.

You taught me a softer way to love. Because I think you taught me there are some people we will never fall all the way out of love with. And that can be okay sometimes. As long as you are not destroying yourself with longing. Some things cannot be helped.

~ #3 : reflections on falling out of unrequited love with him

“What do you want?”

“Whatever you are willing to give. I will take. And I will make do.”

~ Even if it just with the scraps of you

"I miss you."

"It is easy to miss someone when you are lonely and the night is quiet. You crave company and companionship. You do not crave me."

I want to say

"Missing you is never easy."

I want to say

"I crave you always. It is you, always."

But instead I say,

"Yes, I miss you then. But I miss you most when I am surrounded by people and happiness. Because it is then my heart aches deepest with the knowledge that there is no one else I would rather share this joy with."

~ even in my dreams you do not respond (rewriting the conversation we never had)

Oh to be loved the way she loves the dawn.

To be seen the way she sees the sunrise

To hold her the way she lets the light hold her.

-

Which is to say I fell out of love with you to save myself. In an act of self-preservation. To keep loving you would have killed me. So I stopped. And I think this is why you were the person out of all the persons I've ever loved that I got to keep in my life even after. Because loving you was growing up. Was realizing just because you can't have the entire good thing doesn't mean you have to deny yourself the piece offered. That a slice of lovely doesn't have to be the end of you. Was learning to make do with what I was given with a smile and a thank you. Was learning to be grateful. Because we don't always get to have what we want. And we can't keep throwing tantrums by having panic attacks in the bathroom over accidental glances and unintentionally broken promises.

Loving you was growing up. Was realizing some people are nice to everybody. They have a talent for making people feel wanted, but this does not mean that they want you, and that is okay. That is okay. Their kindness is not their fault. Loving you was growing up. Was realizing people are busy. People's lives don't stop because you have chosen this inopportune time to become madly infatuated with them. They don't text you back. They don't love you back. They don't think about you. They forget to ask about your day. They say things that hurt even when that wasn't what they meant to do. And you grow up. You brush it off. You realize this is not a reflection of your self worth. You stop expecting people to fulfill what you dreamed them up to be. You let them just be them. And you learn to let this be enough.

Because loving you was growing up. To keep loving you would have killed me, and I realized for the first time how childish it was to disintegrate into a hurricane of self-destruction when rejection was so softly gifted. To ache until I tore like it would change anything. And I suppose growing up doesn't have to mean wanting to live, but it at least meant trying. Which is to say I fell out of love with you to save myself. In an act of self-preservation. To keep loving you would have killed me. So I stopped. Which is an oversimplification of the process of withdrawal but I did. I fell out of love with you. And I am better for it.

~ #4: reflections on falling out of unrequited love with him

(Original excerpt removed from '#3: reflections on falling out of unrequited love with him')

I met you when I was young. We were both young, but now I see it. I was 15 and you were older and kind and spent smiles like they cost you nothing. Maybe it was this illusion of abundance that originally tipped me into the fall but you were everything I never thought could exist for me.

My best friend introduced us in passing. I met you mid-morning in the middle of the week in the middle of a bustling hallway. Maybe this was the first sign that we would never be anything all the way. You made a joke about my name but it was all in good fun and to hear my name on your tongue made my palms prick. All I saw was your smile, brilliant enough to blind. It hurt to look at you too long, but I did it anyway. I was always a little bit of a masochist I suppose. You will learn this soon enough, when I love you so hard it hurts. When I manage to turn this soft thing between us sharp. But in fact, you won't. You won't learn this. And perhaps that is where we begin to fall apart. Or when I do. I begin to fall apart. Because we never seemed to do much of anything to you. We never seemed to touch you at all. While we tore me apart. Or I did. I guess it was always me doing the breaking, wasn't it?

We leave after last period to get lunch from the place near school you swear has the best fries. We miss 3 busses trying to figure out the route, the last one is on me because I can't run in flats with my school bag. While I walk, you sprint across the parking lot to buy our tickets but we're already too late. I don't want to watch the movie even if it's only 5 minutes in. I want to leave. I've wanted to leave since we waited for your food in awkward silence for 15 minutes but I swallowed and called it first date nerves even though we never said it was a date and I know now that it most definitely wasn't. And that's how things always were between us, weren't they? Me being let down by my own expectations of you. Me taking your kindness and taking and taking and taking even what wasn't there?

You let me pick what we watch instead since we're already here and pay for my ticket. I return the cost to you in the dark of the theatre. The movie is bad. In fact it's awful. I lean away from you and bite my nails during the sex scenes I didn't expect from the trailer. I wince every time I hear you shift, so sure you hate me as much as you hate the film, quietly begging for it to be over. We leave after it's done. I apologize. I didn't know it would be that terrible. You tell me we totally could have caught the original one we came to see and I nod, holding back tears that taste like shame. But you mean nothing by it.

It's summer, warm and sticky, walking across the parking lot.

I fell out of love with you then.

I didn't know it in that instant but looking back on it, this is the exact moment.

I realize there is nothing here. Nothing between us but space. There is nothing here, and the question is seeded if there ever was. The thought takes many weeks to root and bud. Months to flower and come to fruition. But it is planted here. Here, I keep searching for a feeling of comfort even if just in your presence but there is nothing to find. My stomach turns at my mother's missed calls, she's wondering where I am, who I'm with, and I'm panicking because I am still young. You offer me nothing but shrugged shoulders and it is worse because I know you mean well. Or rather that you mean nothing by it. And suddenly I know that I need you to say something. I need you to say something that matters right now. Or there will be nothing to come back to tomorrow.

But you don't. You don't walk me home. You walk me to the street across from my father's apartment building. Nod. One hand wave. See you later. Walk back across the street before the light can turn red again. You don't look back. And of course, I only know this because I look back. Stare after you. Not heartbroken yet. But gently being let down. For the next few days I would rather not think about you. I try many times to remake how it happened in my head but I'm grasping at threads. There is too little material to sew a new tapestry memory from stray comments and wayward touches.

After this butterflies were not summoned at the sound of your name, funny how easy delicate things die isint it. After this, I did not feel the tug of your orbit's gravity pulling me closer to you in a crowded room. Your words sounded less and less divine to me, I think this is because I started hearing what you were saying instead of what I wanted you to be saying. After this, the poetry about you turned sad, then angry, then ran mostly dry. There were no more tears shed over you in the bathroom around the corner from the theatre classroom because your promises were pretty coloured tissue paper flowers to me now. Good for decoration and conversation, but they would tear easy, for they were never meant to last. Never crafted to be put to the test.

We try again a few times. Every once in a while I find you at my locker at the end of the day and we try again. Painfully awkward, but we try again and again and every time I think it's over you're there again. Here is where you instill in me the inability to get over you all the way. You do it by accident. Or at least mean nothing by it. And I begin to understand this the hard way. It's hard because everything means something to me. For I have spent my life trying to squeeze enough from the nothings cast my way.

You ask me out of the blue if I'd like to go for bubble tea and I say I've never tried it so we do. My mother is at work and my sister is in school and no one is at home to expect me and I feel sickeningly giddy at the little rebellion. The silence is only half as uncomfortable as before. The other half-emptied of expectation and filled with acceptance. But the place is closed and this time I laugh at the inconvenience fate keeps gifting us. I tell myself it's a sign. One I'll look at later. We go somewhere else. Somewhere convenient. Somewhere familiar.

You buy me an iced coffee we playfully push the two dollars back and forth across the table as I insist to pay you back and you refuse. As a gentleman. As a friend. The spell is broken when you ask about a scar and I realize I could never tell you. Well, I could. But I don't want to. That someone like you would never understand. And you let the subject drop so easily. You let it all go so easily. Instead you check the bus schedule and walk me to my stop. You get on your bike and ride down the street and you don't look back.

Another time you meet me at the mall. My father asks to meet you so he does. You are the first boy I know that he ever meets. But of course, this means nothing to you. And so I try to let this mean nothing to me too. I link our arms together and it's easier to touch you. Without anticipation. You leave me after we eat cinnamon rolls and do not look back. And I always find myself looking after you. A part of me brought back to the piece of myself left in that movie theatre parking lot in the afternoon sun. But I don't ever really love you again after that.

And I am better for it.

We are better for it.

I am glad I still have you.

For I don't know what would have become of us if not for your careless gaze and fickle heart.

I do not know what would have become of me.

And I am grateful now, for the falling out of love.

- #1: reflections on falling out of unrequited love with him