dreamland

twenty-one

My best friend tried to talk to me but all I could do was push her away.

I already knew she would be angry at me for even speaking to you and letting you yet again kiss me.

But as I said, she had never been in love so how could she have known what I felt.
There was no way, no matter how empathetic she was.
This was something she had to feel on her own skin.
It didn't matter how descriptive and detailed I could have been when telling her.
It wasn't the same.

I went about my days in class, awaiting your next visit when I saw her laughing as she left the cinema.

My mom wanted to make flan, so I was the one that had gone out to pick up all the ingredients that we would never use again.
It was good I think.
Being inside the four walls of my bedroom was like being in the ocean all alone and deserted.
When you are deserted all you do is hope that someone will come for you.
No one ever did except my mother with her proposition.
I think that all the emotions I felt when I had seen you, drained right out me.
All those emotions you knew you would have inflicted on me all over the fuck again.

Her eyes were bright and her hair was still luscious as ever against her mauve coat.
I found myself feeling self conscious in my oldest jeans and my dad's old sweater as I held the grocery bags in my hand.
By the sight of her gleaming eyes, I knew that she hadn't seen you yet.
I don't see how she could have been laughing that hard with the knowledge of your return now raining down on her.
I know that your return came like a tropical storm my way.
I would have been able to recognize the unsteadiness in her posture and desperation quivering on her mouth.

I kept gawking at her until she finally turned to look at me because she had felt my heavy gaze on her.
Her smile erased from her face and she stared at me too.
Without thinking I stepped over to her and her friends all parted and looked at me strangely. They didn't know who I was but she did.

She looked confused as I grabbed her elbow and pulled her aside.
I was confused too because I didn't know what to say until suddenly I just said it.

He's back, you know, he came back, I told her and I didn't have to use a name, she knew.

Her big eyes blinked at me before she said in her tender voice, I know.
Even her voice was delicate and almost hand-crafted like the rest of her.

I felt suddenly crushed by disappointment.
It came down on me and smushed me flat on the sidewalk cracks.
I realized that she didn't care.
I realized how much I had cared and how much I had wanted to see it affect her.
I wanted to see her big eyes fill with repressed emotions and for her voice to become soft and breakable.
Yet it didn't.
That was all me.

I let go of her elbow and she looked at me blankly.
The sound of you didn't make her waver or crush her bones.
All these emotions were mine and only mine and mine and mine.
I was so disappointed and just mad that it hadn't done that to her.
It was unfair, it was so unfair.
I felt like a little girl that hadn't experienced adversity at all in her life.

So I walked away from her and I could hear her friends ask her who I even was and she said that I was someone she had never met.
Which was true but even so, I had felt that I had known her through you.

I walked briskly to my car and threw the bags in the passenger seat and started my car right up.
I drove past her and her friends as they spoke and smiled at one another.
It was like I hadn't even come by.
I had just been a ghost lurking the streets confusedly.
It wasn't fair. It wasn't fair. It wasn't fair.

I gripped onto the steering wheel tightly and took a left turn where it should have been a right.
I stepped on the gas and the lights zoomed at me and filled my eyes with weird shapes.