Scenario: you’ve been in the same relationship for over 4 years, but you two are slowly falling apart. Standing in the middle of the street in the rain fighting with him, reassures you that things might actually be over.
“Ed, does this mean we’re over?”
When I was sixteen, I found myself kissing you and fighting with you in the pouring rain, being completely in love and in hate at 2am, making phone calls, regretting words that were slurred and screamed as we broke up only to get back together a few days later. That was acceptable at that age. You, the quiet, sweet, and charming musician equipped with hundreds of die-hard fans, and me, the sarcastically witty, stubborn and well spoken girl with a soft spot for boys with tattoos and incredible smiles. We were young.
But I am not sixteen years old anymore.
I cannot stand in the middle of the street outside my house with you, fighting and screaming at the top of my lungs. I am not a child who can throw a temper tantrum because I am not getting my own way when it comes to you. Me, hitting my fists against your chest, shoving you backwards by your shoulders, is completely unacceptable at my age. Things exist that call for situations like this to come off as more mature. So when I tell you that I am not sixteen anymore, I’m trying to tell you that there are things that I wish I was still able to do, and knowing that I simply can’t force myself to be immature, provides a bittersweet feeling as I’m watching you walk away from me right now.
As a 21 year old, I’m allowed to swear at you. I mean, I’ve always known you can be an ignorant fuck, but at this age it’s technically appropriate to throw around words that only adults are allowed to use. And because I am twenty-one, I’m allowed to scream these words for the public to hear, to let them know that I know that you are, like I said, an ignorant fuck. It’s also acceptable for me to call you these names, while under the influence of alcohol. However, breaking up while under the influence isn’t exactly classy, and in our case, it usually leads to drunken sex. This is mature for me. This isn’t kicking and screaming and crying like a two-year old. No, instead, I can yell at you, threaten you, and physically injure you in public.
And although I wish the demise of our relationship was as easy as me hitting you so hard that you can’t remember what day of the week it is, we both know that’s not how it’s going to go down tonight.
It started with a simple utterance, from you to me in the early hours of the morning.
“I miss us.” it was quiet, and unintentionally hurtful. You didn’t mean for it to come off the way that it did, but nonetheless, it started out with a simple utterance and it grew and twisted into this huge idea that tore us apart.
Like any bad, clichéd breakup, the weather is anything but nice. The sky takes on a shitty gray color and it’s raining like we’re in the middle of the fucking amazon. Rain hits the pavement at such a fast rate that it’s physically difficult to hear anything but raindrops colliding with the ground. But I can hear you. I can hear your footsteps on pavement, walking away. I’m trying to be mature, to hold it together, but who holds it together after someone they love completely cuts all ties off completely. So, again, like every cliché, tears are not ceasing to fall.
It’s better this way, I guess. To not be okay when everything else isn’t okay. I feel like I’m allowed to have a bad day when the weather is having a bad day. And I’m trying to talk this up as some sort of good thing, as if simply noticing the uncanny action of rain will make up for all of the pain inside my body, running through my veins. All of this god damned pain, caused by you. And that sounds awful, that there is something in my life that has not been there forever that can make me feel like complete shit. How can I be falling apart when I so easily survived without you in my life before? Perhaps it’s the notion of ‘it’s easy to be a half when you haven’t experienced a whole, but once you’ve experienced what a whole feels like, you can never go back to being just a half.’ Whatever the case, it still hurts like hell.
