Letter to a Friend
I always have a lot of things I want to say. As always, I end up saying nothing. I keep trying to separate the times I thought of you as a friend from the times I’ve thought of you as the one person I’m always going to love with all my heart. I always knew the time would come where I wouldn’t be able to fight who I fell for. You truly can’t help who you fall in love with at all. For the record, I never thought it’d be you. I always thought that warding off the people that showed interest in me would keep me safe. Maybe I didn’t want a person I could be with for the rest of my life, maybe I was okay being alone, because being with someone has never really been rewarding for me. Ever. I’m always the one that gets hurt and thrown aside, the one that embarrasses herself with pathetic attempts to get back what was never truly mine to begin with, the one that has a problem understanding that people can be cruel and cynical, they can hurt you intentionally and really not give a shit about it. It’s hard for me to understand because I would never do something like that intentionally and consciously. While I was busy falling out of love with people, I fall in love with you and it just hits me, takes me by surprise when I’m most vulnerable, when I least expect it and I fall on my ass. I don’t have the strength to fight this, to show the world once again I can be strong, I don’t. The truth is it hurts loving you. It hurts not being right for you. It hurts knowing we can’t be together because the world will not approve. We’re nothing without our worlds, we need our worlds more than we need each other, no love can be enough to convince us otherwise. It hurts so much I can’t stand it because as much as I can’t stand the pain, a part of me likes loving you and I hate it. I hate the part of me that is willing to take the pain if only for those few moments in our lives where I can feel loved by you too. They may mean just the same to you but to me they always, always, always mean the world. And it’s enough. You may never love me the way I love you but those moments are always enough and I settle. I settle for less. I settle for someone that is never going to love me back and I understand it’s just what I get. Not all of us were born to be with somebody and I’d rather love someone like you with all my heart than love someone that will only hurt me like that. This is a prison I may never be free of. We’re never truly free but we learn as we grow that we’re free to choose prisons that make us happy and that’s you for me.
When they ask whether you can be dead while you’re alive, I’ll say yes. And you can be in hell as well, just a different kind of hell, one that burns on the inside, makes you choke, makes you physically ache, makes you scream, makes you cry, makes you tear your skin open, makes you bleed, makes you regurgitate your insides, makes your head hurts, makes your stomach twist and turn until you forget what hunger is, makes you breathless, makes you write stuff like this. My kind of hell. This is it.B