You and I broke up a lot before.
Most of the time, we were always screaming, fighting about how I slept with your best friend when I was drunk, or how you got high with Alexa Nilsen from your fourth period math class, but the thing is, that was nothing. They always ended the same way: 12 AM phone calls, whispering apologies deep into the night, me, crying, and that'd be the end of it. Then the next day we'd be kissing in your locked bedroom door, making up for the time we had lost, and I'd forget why we broke up in the first place.
We were dangerous for each other—fire playing with fire—but it was beautiful, and I knew we were both addicted to it. I was the best thing you ever tasted, and you were the biggest drunk I'd ever met; I never minded because your alcoholic breath was laced with compliments no one ever dared to give me.
I loved it.
I loved us.
We weren't matches made in heaven or anything like that, but you were something that I desperately wanted, even though I knew it was bad for me. It was the same thing for you. You wouldn't keep on coming back if it weren't.
People always said that our "real" break up was bound to happen—friends, parents, and all of them; they didn't get it. I always thought it was because we were both way too smart, too "artistically-inclined," as we both put it, for them to understand our dynamic, but when it did happen, it was not filled with overflowing tears and shrieks of pain like I thought it would be.
The whole thing started with me, over your house one day, staring at your Maria Sharapova poster. It was strategically placed on your door, right in front of your bed. You got it awhile ago, partly because "she was a good tennis player"—someone you'd ideally marry, but mostly because she was really hot. We broke up for a bit after that because 1. you didn't say anything when I asked you if I was hot, and 2. apparently, I wasn't your ideal candidate for marriage, but then we made up an hour later. It was stupid, but to be honest, the fact that we were together is the stupidest idea in the first place.
That day, you were quiet. I was lying down at the edge of your bed, looking at Maria Sharapova's arms and her stupid, perfect face when I realized how silent you've been. It wasn't anything out of the ordinary; we were never the kind of people to talk a lot (I always said we were people of action), but this silence stretched over to the opposite walls of your bedroom, while somehow remaining thick, like cumulonimbus clouds hanging in the anticipation of thunderstorms and lightning.
"What's wrong with you?" I asked with nonchalance, albeit accusingly. I wasn't looking at you yet because I didn't care about what you had to say, to be honest; I didn't suspect anything.
You hesitated. I would normally pick up on it, but for some reason, I didn't that day. I blame it on stupidly perfect Maria Sharapova, and my jealousy over why you are so infatuated with her. You coughed a fake cough to get my attention, and then sighed quickly right afterwards when you realized my ignorance. "Emilia."
My full name never sounded so ugly until you said it right then and there. I sat up quickly after that. "What..." I answered warily.
You inhaled with gusto, jaw tight and eyebrows pulled together. To be honest, you looked like you were about to vomit, but I think you were just trying to be dramatic (we were the best writers at school, so we obviously had a thing for being pawns in dramatic affairs, even if we had to make them up). But soon after that, you said quietly, lamely, "I think we should break up." And that sentence right there carried enough drama already as it is. (Looking back at it, you really didn't need to have that whole show of looking sad).
Despite those words, despite how you looked sick to your stomach, I remember that I snorted and laid down on your bed again, glancing back up at that giant poster of a woman that was not me. "Yeah... okay," I laughed incredulously. I thought it was going to be one of those times, those dumb breakups that we've come to love over the past couple of months.
