S A R A

Ch 26

26

What was it that I felt? Care? Gratitude? The forbidden word called love? I spend countless sleepless nights trying to figure out the answer. Maybe I've done something wrong from the beginning. Was it a mistake meeting Haden? All that he has brought to my life were complications and despair. Of course we had our special moments that bring warmth to me when I think of them. I just don't know what to do. I can't tell him this either, he wouldn't understand. I can only wait.

Eventually, it all started to make sense, though. Like a cloud formation which eventually floats into a comprehensible image. I began to see what I was missing. How, sometimes, the circumstance of the situation molds it into something it's not. Like how you can fall in love with someone, think that this it, but only because you've never been touched and your brain released chemicals and you thought that this must be the meaning of life. When really it is all relative around the one meaning of truth. Everything else is just levels, above and below, of our perceptions.

Another thing, my skewed perception of reality. I was so busy living inside a dream that I didn't notice, failed to notice, my reality. It was not at all like in my head. All the things that I thought I was, thought I wanted, were so out of balance with my actual situation. This is why I fell into such an existential downward spiral in high school. My brain literally could not comprehend, why I was so unhappy.

But it hurts, doesn't it? Looking reality directly in the face. Having the discipline to remind you who you are, where you came from. Where you're going. Where was I going. If I didn't make up a preference soon, I was afraid I would get nothing, or something somebody else chose for me.

So at that, as much as I needed to be an artist in my life, I needed to figure out my life more. To deal. To start internally and from the bottom. It's the great paradox. You have to go around and behind to the side door to get where you can see from the direct path. The direct path is a lie. It's an illusion, even if the destination isn't. Paradox.

Yet, this same creativity is vital. In order to achieve, to create, to imagine - you need this same creativity because it makes you see what is at the end of the path. Once you have enough courage to take the side road though that's when you reach it. It is all a balancing act.

But those were the dreams of a little girl, impervious to the harsh realities of the world. Like absinthe on a wound.

Either way, I saw him again that Sunday afternoon. He called and told me to come back. Obviously, I obliged.

He came up to me, and I knew from the way his mind seemed to be somewhere else that I wasn't going to like what he had to say.

"I..." he looked at his phone, then on the floor, putting the phone back down on the kitchen counter.

"I've been misbehaving," he said in an almost mischievous way with a hint of what was supposed to be regret.

"I need to tell you before we move on, and you may not understand, but that is fine.

When we first met, I was involved with a girl in London. Involved is a bad word, we have technically been together before, and at that point it was a long-distance relationship falling apart. We followed each other to New York for 4 months. But now, I barely ever go back to that place....I like her, she likes me. She knows my family, I know her's. She is a nice girl, which is why I feel bad. I was going to call it off, I swear, but then she got pregnant, she told me just two weeks after you and I met..." she said "I'm having your baby, its none of your business".

Oh...my...god

"But she lost it, the baby, two months later. After that, I felt like I couldn't break up with her then. Even if I did love you at that point, I loved her once too. She wouldn't let me and I guess I wouldn't let myself. I couldn't leave her after that. Except that I was going to when I went back to London after your graduation. With the accident and her, it was all too much and confusing. We met up as just friends, then when I dropped her off, she just sorta kissed me though I tried to make it clear that it was over, but I couldn't really stope her."

Yes you could.

So it wasn't nothing...

I couldn't believe my ears. I always suspected there was someone else, but not in that way. I thought that naturally, him being in that position, there would be those that come and go. After all, the whole time that I held back, on the outside, I had no right to stop him. Though if he only knew what I felt on the inside.

So now was no exception, and I tried my absolute best to look unaffected, or at least as minimal as I could manage.

"The reason I'm telling you this, is that she is coming to visit. From London. This was planned for a long time. I'm not planning to see her, but she might try to see me..."

"Well, does she know about me?" I asked hoping I didn't come off too psychopathic.

"Yes, she knows about you," of course, "and all my other friends."

Oh, friends. Meaning that she doesn't actually know about us. God, there was no explanation for the heaviness that I felt in my heart. It wasn't fair!

The thought of having to meet his "real ex-girlfriend", and him having to introduce her to me and us having to eat breakfast together all the while I , having to pretend like I feel nothing like I am reduced to nothing made meant to vomit. Everything. All my feeling metaphorically not one big firework. If I never fell in love with him, and only his attention, why did it have to hurtt so?

I didn't think he could understand, I wasn't even sure if he was cable of understanding how this all made me feel.

I almost could not comprehend it myself.