4. the thing about ghosts
He knew he was never going to love me again. He knew the second he stepped on that plane that things would never be the same. Not him. Not me. Not us. There was just no way. He made up his mind on that long flight home and never told me. Four years later and he’s still never told me. Not with words. Maybe he thought I’d get the point when he deleted all the pictures and the once loving captions he used to write on facebook. But that wasn’t enough for me to know. I didn’t think the bounds of love were public evidence on the internet. I didn’t know I should give up on us. I didn’t know he stopped loving me.
And the truth was that he lied to me for the next four years.
Because even when you know you’re never going to love someone again you can’t help but suck every last drop of love they have for you out of them - I mean, as long as they’re offering, who would say no? He didn’t say no. He could never even say no to me. Eventually he said enough fucked up words (never: no) to me and did enough fucked up things to me it became unbearable to keep loving him. So I stopped. But only after he had stopped loving me four years prior. I’d call myself delusional but hopeful romantic is more accurate. I was full of fucking hope. Until the very last period of the very last text I ever sent. I was full of hope that he’d love me again. Because like I said, I wasn’t aware he had already stopped loving me so long ago. I knew he was troubled. I knew he wasn’t easy. But I never gave up on our romance.
Until I made myself.
Looking back I’m not sure how much of it was actually romance. Sure, we’d sit on the beach at night drinking wine and telling eachother our life stories and our dreams for what we wanted out of this life. But it was more like therapist and patient, wasn’t it? You loved the idea of someone taking care but I’m not sure you really liked me. You just liked that I cared about you. I cared soo sooo deeply about you. You were so focused on being cared for, for the first time in your life, you didn’t even think to care for me. You didn’t give a shit about me. You never did. I was the self-less listener to all of your bullshit.
And what’s so fucked up is the more I know about people the more that I love them. All this time, I was falling in love with you and you were simply babbling on about yourself across the table’s length and beer pints. We never had a proper date. I asked for the check, knowing you were too timid to ask for what you want. So content with staying frozen in place, never growing on together.
And what was I to you but a figment of your elaborate imagination. A fucking ghost to see through. I was the all the people who never gave you a chance before I came along but I was never a person to you. You never treated me like a person. You treated me like I wasn’t real. Like I didn’t have real feelings. But I was real. I was sitting right next to you, full of so much pain. I’d go to the bathroom and cry as you sipped on the PBR I got for you, and I’d look myself in the mirror and say “you see him so clearly and he doesn’t even see you.”
You never even saw me. You’d look into my eyes but never felt my soul. I would cry all around you and you never noticed. One time, I was so sad, I woke up and cried in your bed as you slept next to me. You didn’t even notice. You couldn’t even feel the warm body quivering, inches away from you. But I could feel every molecule of your being in my bones.
I took your pain away and you didn’t think to ask if I was okay. I waited so long for you to open your eyes, for you to see me but you never did. You never asked me how things made me feel. It was always about how you felt. And I let it go on for so long. But that’s the difference between you and I. I still cry because after everything I know about you, I don’t get to see what you’ll do in this life. And you don’t even think about me.
Because ghosts don’t live on, they die the day you stop imagining them. I’ll wonder your existence knowing I don’t exist in your world anymore. And I’ll wonder if I ever really did.