You told me not to apologize anymore, but I don’t know what else to say when our old apartment smells like Thai food and cigarettes and you’ve
been gone for six months. I don’t know what else to say to make you like me. I
want you to like me, maybe not in the Han and Leia kind of way, or in the Jay
and Daisy kind of way, but in the Ted and Robin kind of way. You know, where we
still care about each other, and you still answer my text messages, but we
don’t kiss anymore or go to dinner alone. We could just go to the bar and
you’ll buy the drinks because you have a better job, and I’ll talk about how I
want to get married someday. Not to you, obviously, but to someone who makes me
forget what it was like to wake up alone after you left.
Maybe I’ll snap out of it one day, and I won’t need your friendship
to feel whole. I won’t feel like walking on egg shells when I text you,
timidly, asking you how to turn on the food processor you left in my kitchen.
Maybe I won’t want to cry in a restaurant on the Lower East Side when they play
Israelites by Desmond Dekker. Maybe I won’t need to apologize for wanting to be honest.
Maybe I’ll figure out how to stop feeling like the villain and the victim all
at once. Maybe I’ll forgive myself for the things that we did to each other
without needing to hear you say, “It’s okay.”
The happy ending in all of this is that I’ve actually found
someone who doesn’t mind when I want to listen to sad folk tunes and snuggle when it's snowing in Brooklyn. Someone who stays put when I’m crying and wiping
snot on the bottom of my Rolling Stones shirt, and probably thinks it’s kind of
funny because he hates the Rolling Stones. Someone who hates when I publish stories about ex boyfriends
and hates when I compare him to other people like I’m doing right now, but
loves going out with me on Fridays and loves the way my hair smells and loves
my stupid laugh and loves when I don’t want to make dinner because we both love
ordering pizza.
And these things take time, you know. But that is, at least, a start.
