Strawberries and Whipped Cream

Chapter 9 - Floraison

Your childlike happiness, your sweetness, was killing me. 

Ever since I had first laid eyes on you, I-... no, that is not how this will start. This wasn't love at first sight. It wasn't even truly interest at first sight or attraction, even if I did find you beautiful, that does not mean that my insides had told me to catch you, to let you feel me when I had laid my eyes on you. I did not believe in such a thing, I still do not, but there was an interest in you, that came from boredom, from loneliness and I hate nothing more than admitting just that.

 Wasn't that exactly what I hated so much about the modern American society? How dating seemed to only exist for the sole purpose of soon getting married to one another. I despised the youth that felt the pressure to have their dream wedding by the age of twenty-six and if it wouldn't happen, they could just kill themselves. 

So they ended up marrying a guy, that maybe if they had the option, wouldn't even be one in the first place. He was good enough and I didn't want to be alone, so we got married after one year of dating. How pathetic. I hated these people whose sole purpose it was to find a partner, make a commitment and set more humans into this miserable world, like the American dream required them to do. But now, hadn't I done the same thing? Hadn't I just started going after you, because I was afraid of the lonely nights I would spend in Juan-Les-Pins? Wasn't it me, who thought of how jealous my friends at home would be, if I told them that I had finally found somebody for the long run?

 I shamefully had to admit to myself, that these were my intensions, at the beginning. I didn't plan on dating you, if I didn't like you, I didn't plan on marrying you, just so I could say that I was spoken for and I never intended to go further with you, than we should, simply for a story's sake. No, with each passing second, that I got to spend with you, I started to fall more and more for you. It hurt how happy you looked and I knew that I was the reason behind it. It hurt so beautifully and I wanted to rip my heart out, just to stop what I was feeling when you were sweetly smiling at me, being as kind as you never were to anybody else. 

A childlike happiness. I do not mean that you had the innocence or face of an actual child, maybe I am just using that word to cover another one, which was genuine. Your happiness was genuine as was your smile and it drove me to insanity. Was I really lucky enough to be the reason behind it? Had you fallen for me so much, that I brought out this part of you?

It was a nice thought and I would be lying if I said, that I didn't like the idea of making you happy, but it also seemed like a big responsibility to be somebody's happiness. I suppose you weren't unhappy before you met me, but you had changed in my presence and it seemed for the better. Your personality did not exchange traits for others, no, but you were shy and yet bold, you were silent and still said what you really wanted to say, not like you did with your friends, where you would speak a lot and be as outgoing as I had never seen you before. 

You were nervous around me, I suppose, but you also carried this genuine smile, as if the world suddenly seemed brighter than it ever had before or like the stars were showing you in their full potential, how beautiful the nighttime could be. Apparently, I had brought joy into a dull life, or so it seemed. And as much as it scared me, I also felt an immense sense of lightness and importance. I mattered. What I said, what I did, how I felt, it all seemed to matter to somebody and oh how good it felt to be seen. 

Of course I knew that I had been loved before, by people I did not particularly even like and they tried to give me the same sense of comfort and feeling needed, that you gave me with a single gaze, but I could never appreciate it like I did with you. Maybe because it fascinated me that somebody like you could think of me so highly, to like me to this extend and it made the world seem absurd, but maybe it was also that I liked the smell of you, that was a mixture of your detergent, your sweat and deodorant as well as the rest of sunscreen left on your skin.