History

What I want you to do is write back. I want you to email and say that you’ve been acting like an idiot. That you know the unreturned texts were a dick move, that the statements about doing something or other that never manifest were a bad idea on your part. That you blowing off anything even remotely serious, even on a friend level, is not really who you are, but is instead just a temporary departure from your norm. Admissions that you got lazy are welcomed. Acknowledgements that you thought you wanted this something once, but just aren’t ready for it, are also appreciated.

I shouldn’t care this much about this pebble under the mattress, but I do. When I get a text I wonder if it’s you, even just to say something small and meaningless. They aren’t from you, and they were always meaningless. When an email pops up in the lower right of my screen, I hope it’s from you, one of the one-liners that somehow has sustained me for all this time. The ones with the incomplete words and intentional misspellings. To save time. Because it takes time to type seven words correctly.

When I’m tired, this is worse. It hits me like cold water splashed on a cranky baby and there simply isn’t time or an available resource to make sense of what’s happened. The wine probably doesn’t help. In the moment it seems to, makes me feel a little giddy. The giggles make me more resilient. They make me feel marketable, too. A sad state of affairs in and of itself.

I want you to realize that I’m a good thing, a great thing, a woman worth spending the tiny energy it would take to make something of this. You’re there – I saw you – so why beat that part of you into taking that back seat? Don’t you want something this rich in your life?

It shouldn’t be this hard. And so it won’t be.