dreamland

twelve

Days passed and all I felt was confusion and more confusion as old and new feelings arose and spun into this tangled web.

My friend called me and called me and told my best friend to tell me that she was sorry.
But even my best friend didn't want to hear it. She understood the code.
She understood just how off limits he was and how much he had been a part of the problem. He was the gasoline to an already burning fire.

I stayed home because I knew that the way life was, I would have stumbled right into her at the mall or a the grocery store or any place I went.
It's the way life was, mostly to me.

I ate strawberry ice cream and told my best friend that we weren't gonna talk about what happened that night—what had happened before I saw her locking lips with your best friend. The humiliation was just too much to bear. It was humiliation that was trivial to anyone, but just so massive in my head.

I then dreamt about you on that night again.

I saw your pretty eyes but this time they looked vacant, empty and bleak. It was so strange, all you did was stare at me and not say a word. You just stared and stared at me and before long, your skin started to melt like a popsicle out in hot summer sunlight. Even then, I didn't do anything. I looked down at my hands and slowly the skin on my bones started to droop as well, and slip onto the checkered floor.
My feet and then my face started to drip and then I could no longer see you.
I was glad for that because I had even forgotten some of your features but now I was forced to recall.

Of course I dreamt about him too.
He was just like an extra in a movie though, I would see him walk by in my peripheral vision and then he would vanish. I would attempt to reach for him but fail every time, because he wasn't meant to be the focus of this dream.
Or any dream for that matter.

I would be whisked away by whatever dreamland had in store for me. I would be flying and then simply sleeping and other times eating at the top of a bridge or swimming in a restaurant or dancing in my old high school.
They made no sense just like everything else. It made no sense to me, how things always felt so difficult for me.
It was so unfair.

I remember thinking and hoping that maybe you were having a rough time like I was.

It's what you deserved, wherever you had run off too. You and your friend were both such cowards. After that last and final time you'd come to beg me to understand, your friend came to tell me you left.
I was coming home from my friend's house, searching for my house key when you stood from the front porch steps. I dropped my keys, aghast, and you came closer and reached down for them.
You held them out to me and all I could do was swallow.
I had to be strong.
I had to.
You didn't deserve to see even the most minuscule sign of pain or of anything I felt then.
A car drove past my house and then another before any of us said anything.

I said to you, because being strong meant being the first to speak, why are you still coming to my house.
At least you were sober this time.

Your hair was damp and you smelt like soap and you looked so determined. Maybe this time you had something smart and reasonable to say and nothing cheesy and stomach-turning, but in a, try-harder-you-fucking-idiot-way.

I didn't reach for my keys because I remember thinking that I didn't want to even touch you.
I really didn't.
And not because I was afraid that perhaps I'd want to hold you close or even kiss you, but just because all I could think was of her skin under your hands. If I would have touched you, I think I would have felt itch, so uncontrollably itchy like if there were a thousand red fire ants on my epidermis.
You looked at me for a long time, like you were thinking of what to say, which was smart. Nothing that you had said to me previously, had made me waver.
I honestly don't know what to say, other than I'm sorry, you said dumbly.
I breathed out and looked inside my house where I could see my mother's silhouette move upstairs and like I knew everything of my house and of this town, I knew my dad was downstairs on his couch, watching an old movie with some actor that was so funny you would never believe he was actually the most somber person outside of the screen.