The Guy with the Piercing Stare

Chapter 31: Love Doesn't Exist

You cried yourself to sleep that night. After that long, heartfelt confession, Taehyung had started acting weird around you. He wasn't keeping distance because he felt guilty anymore, he was avoiding you. You scared him away. This always seemed to happen, when you were serious and told things like they were, people got uncomfortable.

Usually they took one or several things they identified with and felt awkward seeing how put off you were by them. Some needed to justify themselves when faced with your convictions. Explain you why they were like they were as if they would change your mind. But you knew what you wanted and that eventually drove them away. That's when they knew not to mess with you.

You thought Taehyung was different, but something set him off. You felt a pang in your chest at the thought, you had trusted him and opened yourself up to him in ways which you had never opened up before. He made you feel safe and cared for and for a moment you felt like you could tell him anything and he'd be there for you unconditionally.

You cried hard into your pillow, your heart shattered as you remembered the stone cold look on his face as he said goodbye and walked out the door. Five months to the trash, you thought, and a whole lot of unbearable pain you wouldn't be able to handle. You felt stupid for still believing someone out there could care about you. Not to the extent you wanted.

You were capable of returning the love in spades, but how did that matter if no one wanted to receive it. Every time you were rejected crossed your mind, every guy who showed interest for the wrong reasons followed. An overwhelming feeling of emptiness and hopelessness invaded you. You just wanted to give up trying.

You wished you had just stuck to your acceptance of being forever alone instead of giving Taehyung a chance to make his way to your heart. You were too much to deal with, you were too picky, too unforgiving, too stubborn, too uptight, too much of a prude, a killjoy, a bitch. You were difficult and unlovable. The words you'd been bullied with resonated in your head. It seemed like the only person who could deal with you was you.

Not even being by himself right now, could Tae understand his feelings. He was terrified of everything that had erupted out of him in the last few hours. He laid on his bed motionless staring beyond the ceiling at his neverending chain of thoughts.

It's not that he had never taken you seriously, but he had never really understood the depth of the situation. He didn't think of you as one more person he was dating, he cared so much about you, but everything seemed to be taking on a new meaning with this confession. He had never understood that word you often used, broken, more than he did now.

He wanted to pick up the pieces and fix it somehow, put them back together so they wouldn't cause pain. He wanted to make up for it and provide you with everything you've never had. But when he knew what you needed of him, he got scared. So many times he asked you if he could do anything to make it better and now that you gave him a straight-forward answer, he couldn't do it.

Can I love you? He asked himself. If someone else could, you deserved that. You deserved to be happy, safe and comfortable under someone's care. You deserved the opposite of the carelessness you had received. He wasn't sure if he could do that. Just trying to consider it made him feel overwhelmed. This was all too much for him to bear.

He laid on his side and looked out his window at the night sky. Why had he put so much into you? Why was he so into you? What was he expecting? What did he want? What was going to come of it? Why were you his girlfriend? Why had he even asked you in the first place?

Tae drowned in the innumerable questions that his mind came up with relentlessly. He had no answer for them, he was on overload and unable to process anything through logic or through his senses. He wanted it to stop as he was disturbed and agitated.

You both had nightmarish nights and woke up exhausted the next day. You got no good morning message for the first time in months and your dried out puffy eyes could not shed another tear even if the feeling was heart-wrenching. You walked into the shower with the idea of your life before Taehyung setting in. It felt bitter, you hadn't minded it before you knew better, but now it sounded horribly depressing.

The familiar feeling of overall inadequacy made its way back to you as if it had never left. You felt alone in the world once more, with no one who could relate to you to provide the slightest of comfort. You dreaded the meaningless interaction you'd be forced to have with other people at work.

You dreaded to hear from any human being, you just wanted to be alone. Socializing was too much of a bother, it was useless and unnecessarily difficult. Nothing good ever came out of it. If everyone could just accept you were not like them and didn't want to be. Maybe they would leave you to yourself. So you could co-exist without any interaction.

You got out of the shower having made a half-assed attempt at cleaning yourself. Opening your closet, you saw the clothes Taehyung got you and your eyes burned with the dried out tears that wouldn't come out. You pulled them out and angrily threw them with all your might against the corner of your room. You cursed at the garments as if they were him and fell on your knees sobbing.

You hugged them and buried your face in them, choking on the tears and taking deep breaths from time to time as you struggled to breath in between sobs. Love only existed in movies, in books, in people's imagination, love is not real and you somehow fell for it every time. You somehow wanted to believe it could work, for some reason you never lost hope.

And that's how you always ended up hurting yourself. You did it over and over again, like a little child who doesn't want to give up their efforts despite their mother warning them. The problem is that even if you got burnt after insisting, you didn't learn. You kept burning yourself until no spot of healthy tissue was left on your heart. You needed to stop.

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