dreamland

twenty-six

I walked to her house even though should have fucking ran.
But I couldn't because my body was aching just like my heart was.

My arms had fallen asleep because for them to be awake was really too much to bear. His absence would have hurt them so much.
And reality only really settles in when your eyes are wide open like saucers.

Even when I drove I did it slowly, regardless of the look in his eyes. I even dressed myself leisurely, looking myself in the mirror with the curse of vanity tickling my skin.
I almost wanted to ask him if he thought I was pretty which was so ridiculous and laughable in that moment. He wasn't capable of a laugh in that moment I don't think.
Not even if it was one to belittle me.

I really should have ran so fast and drove at an illegal speed down the curvy roads. I should have forgotten a piece of my clothing in his car on purpose. I should have kissed him because maybe then it would erase the ugly and bring back the pretty.
But I didn't because I felt so dumbfounded.
It was such a quick shift like when the sun is out and there isn't a cloud in the sky but suddenly in the flutter of an eyelash it begins to rain.
His face was filled with so much regret and I couldn't understand just how. He hadn't done anything wrong. I hadn't either. There shouldn't have been room for regret here.
I wanted to disintegrate in that moment and the same time build myself up into something he would actually like.

I lied there in my best friend's bed and wondered all over again what I was to him. Who was I to him? I cried then because I felt stupid and ugly and easy and everything at once. I felt full of emotions, like a dark graveyard, overflown with too many tombstones. I was empty of the nice ones, of the nice emotions, I was a tombstone that was forgotten, with not even a pot of flowers adorning it. I was crying so loud that I felt I would awake my best friend so I moved to the bathroom. I stood, covering my mouth and telling myself to just wait.
I shut the door and cried into her lilac colored bath towel so that no one could hear.
Not even could I.
I caught sight of my crying face in the mirror and saw that I wasn't even pretty when I did that. I wondered if I had ever been pretty.
To you, to him, to a stranger, to myself.
I felt ordinary with the most common features and all. I wasn't bold, I wasn't a face you saw and couldn't forget. I was just myself and there was nothing resilient about that.
I felt so fucking forgettable.
All I could see and think of, was of her gorgeous hair and lips and skin compared to mine. And I had never been the girl that compared herself to other girls.
Yet now I was.

I was her and I realized why I never had been before. To do so, left you feeling low and dry and awfully upset.

I turned from the mirror and shut the lights off and went back into bed. I faced my best friend's back and tried to coddle myself off to dreamland. I didn't want to be in reality where I felt like the white crayon in a crayon box full of colors. I wanted to be the red crayon or the green one that everyone used for everything in their picture.
Only in dreamland could I be fooled.
Away I slipped, in a river of chocolate or caramel, the current carried me until I could no longer recognize what melancholy was.
I dreamt of myself in his house, in his bedroom that my own mind had painted.
It painted something I had never seen. I had only seen the back seat of that red car and the back of his neck.
He touched me and told me that there wasn't anything ordinary about me.
That was a lie but I still believed it. I think I could afford to be naïve if even for a minuscule moment. There were flowers; hydrangeas and daisies adorning my hair. I could feel them even though I didn't get to see them. I felt like I was the farthest thing of ordinary. His lips felt like clouds on my lips; soft and reassuring like the sun spilling into your bedroom in the morning. He kept kissing me and I kept touching him even though I was so aware that this was just a dream. The heat of his body and the strands of his hair were all artificial. But I took it anyway. I pretended it wasn't.
I found that it wasn't hard to pretend.