Forgetting to Remember

Never Again

The palm of his hand sweeps across my cheek before I have time to react. 

He hit me. 

Aaron Taylor hit me.

I can feel the burn engulfing me, making me red with fury. It’s a feeling I pride myself on not having (or at least keeping very well hidden) yet it finds its way inside me, and I clench my jaw for merely a moment. The second his fingers touched me, my mind went into hyperactive overdrive. 

I have two options; I could be myself or be the person I wanted to be. I could be rational and submissive and passive and the bigger person, or I could finally tell him off, and allow myself to be irrational and angry instead of holding this bitterness inside me. I wasn’t going to give him time to talk. 

It’s an easy decision.

“How could you Aaron?” My words pound into the night. The diner is always our normal meeting place if we were ever trying to work things out, (which has been too often lately) but this is extreme. He said we couldn’t meet at the diner tonight and now I realize it’s only because Nicholas is there, working the late shift instead. 

My fists clench the ends of a bright blue sweatshirt…Nick’s sweatshirt actually. Just the lingering, indescribable trace of his scent against my skin calms me down, but only to a degree. I need Nick with me, yet every time Aaron and I tried to work things out I came alone. I shouldn’t have come with Nick still stuck to my skin. I couldn’t pull in opposite ways at the strings of my affections. 

I had done what Aaron wanted me to do because I still had loved him. I had kept meeting up with him, hoping things might work, maybe even fall back into place. Now, it was like the love was smacked right out of me. Literally. Had his jealousy of Nick really gotten the better of him? Or was he waiting to do that all along? Did he expect me to ever trust him again? All that was left for him was a contempt that felt too close to hatred.

I couldn’t even think of what to say or realize if any time had passed. My thoughts of Nick still coax me, yet make me angry at the same time. “Aaron is not your boyfriend anymore.” I tell myself. “He hasn’t been here for a long time. He wasn’t here for you like Nick was.”  I fume with anger, and I feel the hot tears boiling down my face, scarring my cheeks like acid. I would never forget this. I get myself under control. I will be rational. I will be me. I will not fight back. Not like this.

“What happened to you, Aaron?” My voice chokes up in my throat. I force myself to look him in the eye, all the anger and resentment I have always ignored boiling and exploding up inside of me. His eyes meet mine with immediate remorse, but it’s too late. I will never ever take abuse from anyone. I refuse to be abused by someone who I had once had so much trust in, so much faith and hope in a future, in something stable. What had happened to that? How do you kill something so precious and so sacred? Something that was once so glorified and perfect just…died. How?

 He wasn’t one to be brash. In fact, his actions are completely out of character. Part of my mind sympathizes, crying over the fact that it’s my fault and that he is just upset with me, because he wants me. He wants us again, but did I want us again? Did I want to go back to spring, back to sitting among the breeze and cherry blossoms? Did I want to be so happy and so content again?

“Yes.” I tell myself, refusing to deny it. “But people change, and you can’t go back in time. He’s not the same. We could never get those times back. Any of them.”

 I push back the pity with overwhelming force. I am not going to side with him. I am never going to go back to him. Is he remorseful only because he knows it was too late?

“Never again Aaron.”

There is no response but his own empty, dumbfounded gaze. I don’t even look for remorse. I turn on my heels and whisper it to remind myself.

“Never again.”

I will never take that from anyone ever again.