Glorified high ✓

XII

"I cannot let you burn me up, nor can I resist you. No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed."

A.S. BYATT

You're a walking living breathing work of art. You're a Chris Isaac song, the one about wicked game. Fireworks on a New Year's Eve. You're the calmness of the city when the golden morning light creeps along the buildings and paints windows in shimmering, glazing pink-orange and blue. You're a perfect timing. You're an ice-cream for breakfast. You're a book with a heart-wrenching ending on a rainy day. You're the smell of sticky caramel popcorn and the heat of the night on the boardwalk. You're a kiss on the forehead and message me when you get home.

You are mine. You are mine. You are mine.

Were you mine?

My life that had simmered with the excitement of our relationship was now constantly weighed down with a fear that was creeping around every corner. These feelings of uncertainty and unworthiness were growing inside of me like cancer. I was a dropout that worked in a bakery and complained about how much I hated it every day, wallowing in self-pity, never able to afford to go back to university. All the while you didn't have identity crises like that. Your rich parents paid for your education and you managed to successfully return to your classes at the philosophy department, excelling at all your exams in the pursuit of a degree. Weekends that you used to spend partying, now you spent going to the gym or reading Plato and Descartes, or in parks soaking up the sunrays. Neon king turned docile servant.

I truly believed that if someone threw you in the most hostile desert or inhabitable wild rainforest you would be able to accommodate. You were that amazing and committed, crafted to conquer the world with your wisdom, free spirit, and good nature. Everything about you, your face, your body language, projected sincere interest and I never doubted that you cared about me but I was sure that someone else, better, would steal you from me and I would be left to wonder what my new role would be in your life - back to being just friends? Or back to nothing? Because I didn't think nothing was an option; I couldn't remember anything that happened in my life before you appeared in it.

Remember when we sat in that car park behind the shopping centre talking for hours? We took turns riding in a shopping trolley first, ridiculously fast, then spinning round and round. Your eyes were bright and electric underneath the amber streetlights as I leaned back laughing harder than I had in months. When the moment was over a dark cloud of impending doom slowly returned to loom over me, pointless questions about who I was in this world and why I already feel so old at this age. Who I am without you?

You asked me numerous times before why I didn't return to university when journalism was something I was clearly passionate about but that day you talked about how you could just picture me writing an article for some political newspaper or working on investigative pieces. You were always good at speaking but I was the one who was writing better, you said. "You will have your moment and you will shine. You will grow when it is your time, and I can't wait to see what you'll become."

That's the day when you told me about your broken home, and a father who hit your mother, a stepfather who never cared about a teenage kid and a mother who simply thought that she could buy your love with money. You were not sad then, no, it was all said as an irrelevant comment, a footnote in a book in font too small that nobody ever reads. I bumped my knee against yours because I didn't know what to say to that then, lack of emotional maturity and my tongue always tied in important life moments. Now I know. Family is something you were never shown, never given, always needed. You found it with me, I sensed that.

And then you suggested that you could help me out, money was never an issue for you like it was for me. I refused adamantly, my pride could never accept your charity or cope with the vulnerability of it. I was stuck in this limbo where I had no ideas, no willpower, just like in a hamster wheel, making no progress, dependent on you.