What Do I Know?

“You ever wish you didn’t feel things so intensely sometimes?”

Now, there’s a question you don’t get asked often. Even worse, there’s a catch: it’s not something you can answer in one or two words.

Pretty easy to formulate it, though. You find a girl and you realize she cries over pictures of cute puppies or the thousandth rewatch of Love and Other Drugs. You discover she cried for 4 days out of the 6 that you were away on field work. You look back to that one fight you had and you realize how petty it was. How she’s a child. You’re 4 months in and then you realize maybe this isn’t what you signed up for. You knew she was sad, but you didn’t know just how much.

Funny how some sentiments resonate through the stories we tell of other people. “Hey, you know,” you started telling me while in the middle of discussing a friend’s failing relationship. “He knew she was sad. I mean, he said he expected this.” You paused after this. I realize now you were trying to find the next line’s least damaging form. “He just didn’t expect her to be this sad. You know what I mean?”

I do know.

Still, I can’t help but think that maybe the only time we mean what we say is when we’re not using words of our own. We write love letters and somewhere down that letter, there’s always a quote or an homage from a book you like or, at least, read out of boredom. We get into fights and write long, winded messages on the technological apparatus afforded us and, still, we find ways to use the words of other people. We write prose and still we quote Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Parker. Maybe, when we write, we’re not meant to make legacies of our own the way they have, because we only speak in borrowed words.

So. You ever wish you didn’t feel things so intensely sometimes?

The short answer is no. I wouldn’t know happiness otherwise. The long answer, however, is yes, because number one, to have a “long answer” is the only justification for an even longer explanation.

See, this girl, she cries watching Love and Other Drugs because, in the gritty reality, sick people are difficult to be with. This girl, she cries over puppies because they make her happy. Her temperament is melancholic. Her primary response is to cry. She would not know herself otherwise.

This girl, she’s emotional. She can’t make rational decisions when it’s her heart that carries all the weight and not her brains. For all her acclaimed smarts, she sure can be pretty stupid. You find a girl, you see something in her — only God knows what — and you decide that, hey, this doesn’t seem so bad. She doesn’t look that sad.

But five months down the road and you realize she is. You won’t allow her to put words in your mouth or put assumed regret somewhere in you, but she knows. You won’t say, but maybe at some point, it was what you were thinking.

See, this girl, she absorbs the sadness of other people. She breathes in the dark of other people and carries them as her own. It’s a black pit she keeps filling. She doesn’t tell. She doesn’t open up. Not as much as she used to, at least.

You give her power over you, this piece of shit we call love, and you know you’re only signing up for the sadness. So you do your best and ask her you ever wish you didn’t feel things so intensely sometimes? in an attempt to find the reason you’re involved in this madness.

She wishes she could control it. You find out that she can’t. You put up with it. You think she’s a child. You think she’ll grow up. But you’ll grow white hair and acquire a limp and she still won’t get past the six-year-old that thrives inside her. You give her attention and you’re only watering the seed of a child who won’t grow.

And then, one day, you won’t do any of this. You won’t ask, you won’t give her the time of the day. You’re tired and you just want to sleep.

But you get a poem. You find it in the mail.

She says she’s sorry.

Always,

Claire

On Medium.com

Warning Labels

I've been meaning to write about my first semester in college, but something happened when 2016 began that I just lost the drive to write about it. It is currently sitting in my drafts, unfinished and rotting.

But what is finished, however, is a certain relationship. I am not strong enough to recount to you the entire story since the "breakup" only happened exactly a week ago today. Though I am slowly accepting the reality of it, it still hurts. 

Here, instead, is a part of the story.

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I remember our last day together perfectly. It was a day that we had set a month prior, in December 2015. When we planned it, we just wanted to meet. We weren't planning on breaking up.

But something happened between the day that we planned it and the day we actually met, and while I will tell you that I had already changed my mind about leaving, you thought differently.

We weren't even officially together. Just old friends (or, rather, exes) who (still) had feelings for each other. Just best friends who found comfort in each other that trumped everyone else's version of it. The kind that said, "I can't find this in anyone else but you." You know what I'm saying? Even Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake in Friends With Benefits got nothing on us.

We'd been texting since October last year, just two months after we ended our 8-month relationship. It first started as a normal "how are you?" "yeah, I'm good, MedTech's been killing me" "Please take care of yourself" kind of conversation, as was our habit even before our relationship. Eventually, it evolved into something more than that.

We found ourselves at the crossroads between friends and lovers.

Even at that crossroads, we still found many forks in the road. I was never really over you, even though I had a 2-week tryst after our official breakup and it was with a guy I didn't even like. And you, as you had claimed, were still in love with me and the pain was only making you miss me.

So I never really quite got over you, and that included getting jealous of other girls, of the same girls I was jealous of during our 8 months together. It was a bad itch that I, unfortunately, always scratched.

And you were the same, but we knew our boundaries because we weren't really together. What rights did we have?

That statement sure didn't stop us. Our toxicity to each other was never measured in our rights because, right from the start, we ignored our warning labels and went for the kill. Mine said "toxic material", yours said "fragile". Fragile because I was the one who left. I was the one who always left, needless to say.

We continued texting. I kept trying to push you away, kept trying to convince you that I was only going to hurt you, that even right now as we were texting, I was only making you hope, because we both knew that, after everything, I wasn't ready to be in a relationship again, especially not with you.

You always said that you were willing to wait for me, that if hurting while hoping was all you had of me, so be it.

You never were a fan of self-preservation. We were both the same that way.

What we did was a kind of cha-cha. Whenever you took a step forward, I took a step back. And whenever I took a step forward, you froze in your place, asking yourself if me making the first move was even real.

I'll admit, at that time, I had a cha-cha of my own. A one-person tennis game playing right in my head. My heart was scolding me because I knew I still loved you, and yet, there I was, dragging you by the neck.

In simpler words, I was leading you on. You gladly let me.

But you are still human, after all. Nobody has resolve that strong and the only thing I could tell you was, "You said you read the warning label."

So, on our last day together, after a year and 3 weeks of being together and not being together, including the actual relationship, I snuggled even closer to you, knowing that it would be the last. You were warm and comforting and you felt safe. I let myself bask in that because, even for a moment, I could pretend you weren't leaving.

"I love you," I said, for the first time in a very long time. Even in text or chat, I never let myself say it, afraid that it would only bring disaster to you. I said it a few times, maybe, but never enough to let you get used to it.

And for the first time ever, your reply was "Really?"

I struggled not to cry, instead choosing to just nod and bury my head in your chest, where I felt safer, and wondering why I never held you tight enough.

I had fears of my own. Plenty of them. They clawed at me daily, whispering things into my ears and I used to call you about them, and you'd accept them wholly, even when one of the causes for that fear was you, and you'd talk to me and help me get through it and, I don't know, there was always something in your voice that kept them at bay. Singing or talking—it didn't matter.

But you still left that day. There were many reasons: you got tired. You didn't know if I even loved you enough. And, mostly, you got hurt.

I know I screwed up this time. I had confessed to you, when the new year began, that there had been guys texting me. I never initiated conversation, but the fault in the matter was that I still replied. I did stop. It was never really difficult to stop texting mid-conversation. It was only difficult with you.

But I guess, even then, it was already too late.

The worst part of it all was that we weren't even in an official relationship. Then again, with us, labels never mattered, even the potentially dangerous ones.

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HERE'S WHAT I DIDN'T MENTION: For the first time in my life, I was the one being left behind. Before then, I always made it a point to be the one who leaves, never the other way around. The way I saw it, leaving was the lesser evil. It hurt significantly less than being left behind. But life has a funny way of biting you back in the ass and letting your sins finish you off. 

After leaving behind 3 guys, including him (who I left behind twice), I finally got a taste of my own medicine, and rightfully so, because I had never been hurt this much before now.

But I am happy to serve my penance because I know it is the only way I can fully understand the weight of my sins. 

I'll always be toxic material. What would you expect from a girl with an incurable illness and emotional instability issues? Tox(s)ic(k) material, indeed. 

Always,
Claire 

P.S. I had to keep a box of tissues beside me while writing this. That's why it doesn't make a lot of sense. But that's only a part of the story, anyway. I only write this in the hopes of getting it off my chest, but we all know I'm a professional at lying to myself. 

The Truth About Penance

I wish I could perfectly say things are okay now, but in the end, distractions are just distractions, and one day I'll have to stop running.

In truth, it's just a waiting game. I may or may not be waiting for the right time and right reason to leave.

I will never be okay with it, but maybe if I left behind the people/person who caused the pain, then maybe I will be. I don't know.

It's not pride nor is it stupidity. I should be over it by now, right? It's been months. I should no longer let it serve its purpose of existing. I wish it could be that easy to let go. Am I gripped by pride? Or love?

No. It's fear. Absolute fear that it will happen again and the constant proof that it could and maybe it will. I have convinced myself of these. I don't know how to stop—to place my trust again in people who have constantly found every reason to make the cut even deeper.

It's easy to make yourself seem a certain way to other people, like an unsinkable ship floating steadily on sea.

But even armors crack.

Reader, allow me to confess to you something that I will most likely erase. Then again, not everyone will be able to read this so let me release this from my heart. Let me do this for myself.

I am not as strong as I make myself to be. The unsinkable ship, the outspoken advocate, the one whose belief in love never faltered even with all the tribulations—I am all of those and yet I am not.

I lack the implied strength that comes with those 3 people. I cannot swim, should the ship sink. I would not die for the cause I'm fighting for. I would not put my heart on the line again after everything it has been through.

I am what's left of my armor—the one I call the unsinkable ship, the identity I treasure most. I created it, not for others to see me as such, but for myself, to remind myself I have to be strong in compensation for the truly weak and helpless girl inside.

What I am is scared. Afraid. Incomparably terrified of being hurt again. It is human enough, isn't it? I initially wanted to be positive about the past year of pain that I went through. I wanted to think that there was a reason to all this. Maybe I was just too blind to see that this was made to teach me a lesson and pave the way for the beginning of my penance—for all my present and past sins.

I realize now that the penance—the consequence, the sacrifice—is the inevitable lack of faith in even the most infallible people.

It is an insult to those who have done me no harm and a justice to those who have. I will not blame them for thinking that way.

But I must pay.