zentropy | mileven.

²⁶⁾ i fall to pieces

[JANE POV.]

❝ i fall to pieces, each time I see you again, I fall to pieces, why can't I be just your friend ! ❞

━ CHAPTER TWENTY SIX.

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I FEEL like i've finally returned to my body.

after what seemed like years of madness entangled in each motor function, and uncertainty coating each word that glided off of my tongue, I finally feel like myself again.
like I'm present within my own skin.
like I'm someone beautiful and worthy of love.
like I'm exactly who I was always supposed to be.

maybe it's my newfound success in school and my career, as just last week I landed an internship for a screenwriting company and have been falling in love even more each day with my classes, the UCLA campus, and the professors. or maybe it's the freedom of living on my own, and feeling a sense of duty towards taking care of myself and my own mentalities that were stripped down to barely anything after years of rattling dissonance corrupting my mind.
or maybe it's the people I've decided to surround myself with.

ben was never officially my boyfriend.

we've stayed in touch all this while. we still talk today— yet despite what I may protest to my new friends on campus, we were definitely more than friends, as we constantly went through the motions of becoming friends with benefits, a self proclaimed "thing" – which resulted in losing my virginity to him during our senior year. and in truth, we still were a "thing". we were never exclusive, but he lived only an hour away, and oftentimes during lonely periods I'd drive over or he would do the same. we still were together. just not in the most conventional of circumstances.

but it was funny–I didn't yearn for being in a serious relationship with him the way I did with mike. I was strangely okay with having nothing more than a superficially intimate friendship with benefits, which was partly due to the fact that at times, it seemed that that was the only thing he cared for – the trivial physical aspect of things, as oftentimes he would only compliment my appearance or appeal instead of my personality. he would point out his thoughts of wanting me instead of wanting to be with me. and perhaps that's what I wanted too.

of course ben was nice, and we were good friends, able to carry along conversation in a tune that would uplift my senses, as any other friend of mine would. but my feelings for him seemed to crash into frivolous territories when the romantic thread weaved into our way.
when i found my brain brewing with the thought of him, it was never the harmonious sound of his laugh, or the way he'd smile, or the little things like the crinkle between his eyebrows or the green specks in his blue eyes. instead, it was the flutter beneath my stomach when we'd get too drunk on late nights and make our way to his backseat. instead, it was the goosebumps and excitement of his hands on my waist. it was everything physical, everything heatedly arbitrary, everything above the surface — everything I didn't seem to validate when I was in love with mike.

because when I was in love with mike, I fell for the little things. I fell in love with the cracks in his laugh and the little perk of his eyebrows when he was judging something. I fell for how he consistently wore the same seven striped shirts on a seemingly neverending loop, and how he liked dogs more than anyone else I'd ever met despite never owning one. I fell for the way he always answered my questions with another question, even though it pissed me off to hell and back. I fell for our juvenile jokes and suburbia adventures. I fell for the inexplicable ability he held in his hands to lift each and every worry off of my shoulders and disperse nothing but bliss into my system instead. the way a single conversation about absolutely nothing could've been the wholistic "something" of my day. sure, mike was attractive. he was handsome. I knew that. but that wasn't what filled my mind at the thought of him. unlike with ben, I didn't care for prospects of his fingers trailing my skin or the marks he'd leave on mine. I didn't care for the shape of his jawline or the feeling of his hands gripping my limbs. I cared for his heart. I fell for his soul.