here i am, thinking that he thought i was special. that i was his and he was mine, always and forever (he always switched up the words, i still think of it every time). and maybe we were once, the night we held hands and stared at the stars, our pupils enlarged to see the swirling colors of the universe we would not otherwise have been able to.
but i never stood a chance in the sea of people that love him. and he loved that they loved him, loved their obsessiveness over him. as i became secure and let go of my anxious attachment, he mistook me to be drifting away. but they were never secure, so they never let him go. they circled him like vultures, waiting for him to die so that they could take advantage of his pain and vulnerability to make up for their lack of fathers. he sunk into the arms of these women, far too deep for me to reach despite my desperate efforts.
but, really, how was i any different than them? at some point just begging for something bad enough to happen that he would come crawling back to me. for him to hit rock bottom and realize just how bad he fucked up and just how bad he needed to fix it. and then he would come back to me and he would fix it and i would fix him.
we all really thought that. and he would come back, though it was never to just one of us, not caring that we all eventually found out about each other, just like we almost did not care that he was seeing other people. as long as we had a piece of him we could survive. we were nourished by one crumb of his attention.
i am not special. i was never the only girl. everything he did with me he does with other girls, yet claiming i am the best thing that has ever happened to him. his eyes lit up every time i walked in the room, mustering the biggest smile he could. he talked about me constantly to everyone- every single person in his life knew of me. he would show them pictures of me, boasting about how beautiful i am and how lucky he is. but the whole time, his mind was split between past mistakes and present treasures. then, i was out of his bio as he told people our relationship was "complicated" and that we were no longer together. telling them that i was abusive and he found someone new. this was all news to me, as we were, in fact, still together. though to be fair, he had cheated in every relationship he had been in. but i really wasn't those girls, i was good for him. i was healthy for him. my bad habits included crying and not showering, not drugs or hitting people or faking rape accusations about my dad, like all the other girls. and he knew how good i was for him. i think that is what scared him the most.
yet i still believe i really was special once. when our minds melded together and intertwined, able to finish each others sentences with less than a glance. when his friend captured pictures of the way he looked at me, like i was absolutely precious. when i visited all of his breaks at work and we laid in the backseat, his head resting on my thighs and one of my hands playing with his hair. because he loved that. he would lean into my fingernails like a dog. the sound of cash frenzy was at full volume, he could never play it silently (or any game for that matter) and that was sort of contagious to me. its funny how monumental some stupid casino game was to us. every night he would come home with a giant bowl of chipotle. i would reheat it for him (how hot he liked his food to be should have been his first red flag). we could never commit to a show, so, as we ate, we usually played a horrible, cheap, clearly homemade tubi movie. at night he pulled me as close as he could (his routine attempt at crawling inside my skin). he wrapped his arms around me and pressed my head into his chest, as if doing everything he could to protect me from the demons camping in my walls. i could look unhygienic and unkempt, crying and writhing on the floor in panic, my face swollen. it did not matter. he held me in his arms so tight, distracting me until i no longer thought about whichever depressing subject twisted my arm that day. he would tell me that i am so beautiful and that he is so lucky. that he loves me no matter how insecure or angry i get. that he is gonna spend the rest of his life with only me.
