Thread: The Blame Game.

It kind of looked like a strawberry; it formed perfectly in this weak pomegranate-like hue. Suck out all the air with one thought and then take out a fraction of your anger with a punch. The bricked wall felt no pain, but my knuckles did. They felt about a hundredth of the pain my mind was producing, spewing various imagery and thoughts that all led to one thing. Pain. The mere thought of anything was shut out in my mind, all I thought of, all I imagined, was the immediate past. The conversation that seemed oh so traumatic, its repercussions, even the simple dialect at which it was held pained me. Simple phrases that weren’t vital parts of the conversation seemed tremendously hurtful. The way she uttered the words “anyone” or “don’t” seemed endlessly painful but it might have been the tears that did me in. And not your conventional tears of sadness or joy, but tears of abandonment, tears of fear, tears that said “I’m lost and don’t know where I’m going,” tears that couldn’t be rationed with. Emotion pouring out of her harder than anything I’ve ever seen her display and what hurt the most was not how hard she was crying or the fact that I caused these tears, but it was the fact that I could do nothing about them. She didn’t want me to and I didn’t know how. I didn’t know what to do to make it better, for once I was out of plans and schemes and was left there feeling more bare and naked, stripped of myself than I have ever before.

I lend my hand for comfort but she stabs me in the lungs with rejection. The words I wish to describe the way she pulled her hand away from me are “soft” or “gently” but in reality she jerked her arm back. Looking at me with disbelief. She had wanted nothing to do with me and the sudden cluster of emotions in me caused me the inability to differentiate whether this was for the moment or forever. The thought that nothing was forever is a double-edged sword. For the moment, she hated me. I was all that was wrong in the world. I was the pain in her heart, the lack of oxygen in her lungs. I was her failing grades and I was her ex. In both the sense I was no longer with her and in the sense that I had become the same child her ex had been. She wipes the tears off her face with her pale hands and looks away from me, which in a sense hurts less because when she looks at me she looks through me. Misunderstood, I am the whirlwind of trouble in her life. When she looks at me her eyes question my motives “why did I do this,” but to be honest it was not me that did this. Yes, I take blame for the failure of our relationship, but the pain in her was not caused by me, it was caused by something greater. Something inside her that was never complete, never actually there. I was the reason we fall apart but I was only a part of the reason she fell apart. But for now, I am the scapegoat. I am the cluster fuck of confused emotions in her and its because its partly true but more so because I can handle it, for her.

***
She slid her palm into mine and the cement walls around us seem fruitful in their bland colors. We made our way down the last steps and she looked at me as I pushed the door open in front of her. Her gaze felt warm on my skin and I knew she was smiling. The little fingers sunken between mine feel warm and maybe they are because of mine but a part of me wants to believe in some sort of bigger existential belief. The likes of destiny or fate finally felt right, like the moment is right, for now as I always say. But as much as she hates when I say it I know it is true but wish with all of me that it wasn’t. I provide her the reality check she never wanted, and neither did I. So why was I doing it? Why was I making sure we were ready to fail, why was I so persistent to make sure we both knew this would end someday. Maybe it was my way of rationalizing, I had been hurt before and was scared of getting hurt again. In my attempts to prevent heartbreak, I had caused it. But I had not known it yet. For now it was nothing but the night air. The night air and the dim street lights. The dim streetlights and the oversized sidewalks that ran through the quad. We walked aimlessly knowing there was nowhere for us to go but we didn’t care, we just wanted to walk somewhere together. Our hands had already separated but we kept walking. Through and around school buildings we strolled until we found the perfect spot to settle, or at least we thought so.

A C-like bench that wrapped around the bush garden is were we decided we would rest. Behind us, around the cement bench ran stone pillars. They ran high and curved, as if they were the foundations to a dome that had the top chopped off. We sat with our backs to them and then slid closer to each other.

“So what now?” she asked and I continued to look forward. My thoughts begin to swirl in my head and I try to think of what to say. I want to tell her we’re good but the lack of attention she had started to grow accustomed to showing me had begun to grow on me. Or maybe I should just ignore it I thought. Neither seemed like it would end well but I still had to chose something to do. Before I could settle on one, a bunny jumped out from the bush and onto the sidewalk that curved around the garden.

“Oh,” she said leaving her mouth open in amazement. I looked at her and she had her eyes glued to the small creature. Her eyes jumped with every movement the bunny made and I can’t help but fall in love with her deep gazing eyes. Somewhere along that my vision focused in on her skin, a softness I could see from a mile away, but sitting next to me I could feel it. I could imagine the texture without even touching her, that beautiful porcelain white skin. It all had a strange affect on me. The combination of all of her to anyone else seemed cute or childlike, but to me there was a certain image of perfect imperfection. Like every curve or every fingernail with chipped polish was placed perfectly to make my heart warm. The simple thought made me giddy with childlike bliss. She was my childlike bliss.

“Did that just really happen?” She asked rhetorically.

“What?” I say shaken out of my deep stare.

“That bunny, did that just happen? That was the cutest thing in the world,” and I imagine my face looking similar to hers right now when I speak of her the way she speaks of that bunny.

I give off a small laugh and lean in for short, dry kiss. Its imperfection can be seen by bystanders but to me, I couldn’t tell the difference. It was all I wanted. She leans back and looks at me with a sort of comfort, just the fact that I was there, beside her, made her happy. A thought that now seemed so distant.

“You look uncomfortable,” she said.

“I’m good,” I told her but she wasn’t talking about my state of mind. She had noticed my physical incomfort.

“Are you sure, you look tense,” she said running her eyes up and down my body.

“It’s these back arches, they’re terrible,”

“What do you mean?” She asked.

“The way they curve around your back, it’s just not comfortable,”

“Well,” she said looking back behind me, “they’re curved like your back, shouldn’t you like them,”

“No, it’s forcing me to slouch,”

“You already do slouch,”

“Yeah, but there’s a difference. I want the option to sit upright, I know I don’t sit properly, but I want to be able to fix it. Stretch back and such, you know. Here, I’m forced to slouch.” I said and I could tell she does not understand. Like the way I tried explaining her my slow build up of dislike in her choice of friends, she didn’t get that or this, and truly I do not know how to explain it to her.

“Well we can go if you wanna?” she asked looking at me and I notion off that thought.

No, we don’t have to, I say as I pull her closer to me. She props her legs over mine and curls up into my shoulder as I wrap my arm around her. The night slowly continues to creep in and I watch it come and let it diminish whatever light was left. Total darkness covered us and we sat there happily, just enjoying each other’s company. The slight cool breeze didn’t matter, neither did the time or lack of light, we were happy. We were happy sitting in complete nightfall, almost redundant but we reminded our selves we were happy being happy, we were blissful in our ignorance, in our youth, and in our love.

“We’re good, right?” She asks softly.

“Yeah, what do you mean?”

“Nothing, just I know when you get mad and keep it in, I can tell. But it’s ok right, we’re good right now right?”

***

Her face went from curiously scared to broken and distraught in less then a second. A glossy face with tears she stares at me with a look that question why I was doing this. A look that slowly chops at my insides, a helpless stare that stabs away at my tranquility. My world turned on its head, but it seems nothing compared to the pain she is experiencing. Maybe if we hadn’t fought before this all went down things could have happened differently. Maybe I could’ve been there for her, for comfort, for safety, for reassurance. Maybe I could’ve not been the pain in her heart but the comforting hug that made it disappear for a second. I could’ve been the shoulder she cried on but instead I was the shoulder she turned from to cry about. It wasn’t all me, the pain was deep rooted. It was internal and external at the same time. The world around her was changing and the pain inside that wasn’t fixed before was still not fixed. So when it all went to shit she wasn’t ready. Not nearly ready for the world to kick her to the gutter, to give her a handful of crap and tell her to deal with it, she didn’t know how to deal with it and she didn’t know why.

I was the scapegoat and the massacre, I helped her break down when I should’ve helped her rebuild. The wall she had once so greatly depended on had crumbled before her eyes and she was not ready to trust it again.

“I felt so shitty, but you, you made me feel worse. I was depressed, like regular depressed, and you just made me feel so much more depressed,” she began to cry again, “Why?” Her mouth open, shaken, tears run down her cheeks and I feel helpless. We both sit there feeling weaker than ever and she blames me and I can’t help but blame myself. I am her failures and I am her broken heart. She looks at me and looks away; something about me was too painful for her to look at. I am her depression and I am her anger. She looks away as if searching for happier memories but then she just keeps crying, trembling before my eyes. I am her betrayal and I am everything that’s wrong in the world. I am all the lies and I am all the tears. I caused all of this she tells me with her body as she turns away and the air from my lungs is sucked out. I am the world and I chewed her up and spit her out. She feels rejected and it’s all my fault, even the stuff that’s not. I am her fake friends and I am her mother’s cancer. I am benign and I am malignant.

There was nothing left to say and I knew that. She stood up and faced me for a moment as if telling me she was going back to her friends at the coffeehouse. I quickly rise with her and we lock eyes. All the hatred and miscommunication was put aside for a moment, an unspoken agreement happened. She came in towards me and I let my arms wrap around her. She felt so little in my arms as I hugged her yet it still made me feel smaller. I can feel a few final tears coming onto my shirt and I tighten my grip around her. With my head beside hers I open my mouth to say something, something meaningful, but nothing comes out at first.

“Listen,” I say stalling, “All this stuff, all this fucked up stuff that happened, it happened. It shouldn’t have, but it did, it happened and right now I want to tell you something meaningful, something that will make this all right, but I can’t. All I can say is that it gonna hurt right now, its gonna hurt for a while. Fuck. But the only thing we can do, the only thing we can control is how we handle the future. These times that lie ahead of us are gonna seem awful, I know they will for me, but listen I can only give you this as you go on, this little bit and I hope you believe me. I never meant to hurt you, I never wanted to break up, even though you say that’s how you saw it, its not how I saw it. I care about you, back then and right now, and I can’t speak for the past, I fucked up, but just know as much as it’ll hurt me I won’t say anything. As much as I want to, I won’t try and fix this. I know its what you want, and I want to finally be able to give you something you want and even if that something is killing me, I’ll give that to you. I‘ll give it to you because I care about you, a shit ton. I respect you and…and I want to be there for you, as a friend, as anything, I want to be there because I care. There’s no big plan, no scheme I just want to help out anyway I can, and if it means leaving you alone, I will. I Just hope when the time is right we could come back and talk about it, mend some bridges. I’ll be here for you now, as you go through whatever it is you are going through, and in the future, after you get through it, cause I know you will with or without me and I just hope at the end we can clear the smoke and be comfortable with each other again, be happy again in whatever fucked up way we can find, I feel like that’s how we always were. We might’ve not been a good fit, but we took that fucked situation and made it last, made it worth something even though we knew we could fuck it up at any moment.” I give off a final sigh and she takes it as her cue.

She nods in my shoulder and pulls away giving me one last glance before she walks away. I stand behind and watch her walk, slowly, she walks back like a wounded soldier and the further she gets the further the pain sinks in me. I see her reach her friends and I back step away from that bench we sat on, a bench with a proper backrest. I turn around and walk away. The pain although at first slow, now rushes through me, and the rage begins to build. I can’t think of anything to calm me down and as it all builds I squeeze my fingers tightly into my fist and hopefully blow off some steam. I pull my hand back and smash it into the brick wall and for moment, a split second, my body focuses on my bleeding hand. For a brief second it focuses on the flesh wound and I look at it bringing my numb fist to my face. I look down at the blood slowly oozing from my knuckles and I try to imagine it in a light fashion but nothing helps. I tried to focus on the blood on my knuckles but the tears on my cheeks are far more painful, and with that I must live. With that I walk away and in due time both wounds should heal. Both wounds should heal and hopefully hers due too, that’s all I wish for and it’s all I can hope for. It’s really the only thing I can focus on for now. Love is pain and sure enough too much of it made me break. I’m not saying we were in love or something of the sort, but the notion of togetherness we shared was great and when it all came together it was too much and I had ruined it. Might be due to my own shortcomings, might be something bigger, but for now it’s nothing but a waiting game. A slow, torturing, brutal waiting game.