Love does not conquer all, only the person in love. I think I am so obsessed with love because it feels nice to feel a little less obsessed with myself and feel a little more like somebody else. As we walk alongside our reflections, I look for you, ignoring the palpable scepticism illuminated by a string of lights for a moment, a timeline of sorts. A pocket watch made a home for itself deep in the forgotten sleeve of my jacket. The only way to stop time is to forget about it. As we walk, I savour the taste of half a sentence said. I look at you and I see phantoms from your childhood while I mourn versions of you I never got to know. I wonder if I would have loved any of them more. Watching the sequence of our shadow it startled me how you could see no separation between us. The back and forth of thoughts and emotions moving between us merging and consuming the other with its origin unnamed.
I’m seeing visions of an engagement ring on my hand but not on yours. A crowd dappled with murmurs and a dream I still have that will one day cascade into nostalgia. Already I am a victim to nostalgia glorifying every moment into more than it ever was, even though I have not fully left it yet, just so that I have something to miss. Missing someone is so much more intense than loving them. Maybe this is the story that will make my other stories become a little less worth sharing. You reach for my hand. To you this is a normal day. I reciprocate with no hesitation for this has become routine. I know I will not marry you. I cannot. Although right now I am still so in love with you, not as much as I once was but enough to make me stay longer than I should. Pinpointing the precise moment in which my feelings shifted is something I have not yet achieved but the refusal to let go of a continuous ache is what paved the way for the clarity I have today.
I’m thinking back to the times you underestimated the severity of our altercations. You believed it to be another disagreement, one that would resolve itself without intervention. For me it meant everything, those discussions that you would never willingly return to. Had I not brought it up again you would never have revisited the reasons for why it mattered to me and even though I forced you to listen you did not realise the impact it had on me, and the impact it still does. What matters now is the fact that you did not know what mattered to me then, and you still don’t, and I don’t think you ever will. I never needed you to understand me completely, but I needed you to want to. Yet you cared more about me understanding your perspective. Sympathising with your reasons meant mine never got heard. The whole truth is just the points that matter, and why, and that changes at the same pace that people do.
With my head on your chest, I count to three in my mind, more times than three. Then I start counting to five just to end up releasing a heavy breath. Then I say it. “I love you”. I said it because I’m afraid this might be the last time that I'll get to say it and still mean it. It's an odd feeling being so in love and being too anxious to say so, being brave enough to say such weighted words as I begin to fall out of it. I need him to know that at some point I loved him and in this moment I still do. He said it back although I would have been content if he didn’t. I think that’s how you know it’s the right time to say it, when you won’t take offence if it is not returned.
I could never quote a lover with as much passion and accuracy as I do books. Books are my way of having what I do not have. Books are a way of experiencing potential consequences of actions I am too afraid to commit. I will always be brave enough to read every story that is written, I just may not choose to. With books I can go back and reread a page, use a sentence as evidence however you are the furthest thing from a book that I have known and loved. Your contradictions and a mismatched recollection of events. It was never the sentences that were left up to interpretation that were debated only that of what is often known to be mundane to most.
A sanitised heart once visceral and full of wonder scrubbed until it resembles little of the heart once known. A friend reshaped and shifted, referred to in past tense. I have lived in a state of unmade decisions for so long that it has become a decision itself. I am still with you and even though it is wrong I will probably stay with you until I learn to resent you so that it will be easier for me to move on once I leave. It’s selfish I know. I should let you go but I still love you I just know I won’t for much longer but still I hope you hurt at least a little more than I did, than I do. There was a time when I would have married you and if you ask me today maybe I’d say yes but I know I’d later live to regret it.
words and illustration by Jasmine Fairhurst
