Pulled Back

He'd never know how much he meant to her. He was like a tornado, causing destruction every waking moment in her life. To say that he was a mystery to her would be an understatement.

She spent each minute they spent together, whether it be in large groups laughing or cracking jokes or just by themselves in an intimate conversation, trying to figure out who he really was. Since the moment that they met when she was 15, just a few weeks shy of turning another year older, she's wanted to know the real story behind him.

For the next year and a half, in every moment, whether wide awake or sound asleep, he conflicted her. He was well like the onion, with many, many layers left to pull back upon. He left her crying into her pillows at night, or laughing so hard that tears came out either way. When she thought she had gotten to his center, there was always another layer ready to be pulled back.

After a while, she found it harder an harder to reach his core, and she gave up. There was no way she would find out who he was under his many masquerades. There was little to no silver lining left to be found. She concluded, after a while, that it would be like trying to leave an art museum with the Mona Lisa in broad daylight: an impossible task only to be accomplished by a mastermind.

It was only after she gave up that she found the first crack in his mask. Sadly, he had not been the caring, sensitive boy she had fallen for long ago. He was, instead, a con artist with a string of women behind him waiting to fall at his feet. It was as if that he was some strongly intoxicating substance, and the women he'd leave behind when they could no longer provide what he wanted from them were the addicts.

At first, she dared not believed the things she had heard. She refused to believe that someone who she thought only had others first to be so cruel. She felt neglected and alone. She felt that the wall of trust she had built with him was set ablaze and burnt to the ground in a heap of smoke and white flames.

Then one night, she just stopped. There was nothing to it. She stopped caring what he did or why. He would be gone in a month, anyways, never to speak again as long as time should stand. Why was she letting him underneath her skin if he was only temporary to begin with?

Maybe it was because she kept longing for their relationship to not be temporary. Maybe, just maybe, there was a glimmer of hope that they could work out their differences and just float down a river of passion and romance. The glimmer had long since faded, and, as she knew by now, nothing is permanent.

She realized this as she left out from a party one night, walking alone with only the pale orange street light as her guide, she saw him one last time like the first time she did. He had his head resting on the back of the driver's seat in exhaustion and frustration. She had wondered if his charade had finally given in. She wondered if he finally allowed himself to give up. She thought that he had finally been exposed for the string of lies he had told long ago.

She didn't know why, but she had just started singing. It was a slower song, one she had heard a few months after she first met him for the first time. She hoped he had heard, but she sang so calmly that it might not have been possible. She sang the first two lines, all she knew by heart to him, hoping that the glimmer of hope left for them would ignite in one final hurrah.

And then, she watched him drive away.