I once knew a girl…

 

A girl who’s pain was so hard to deal with, yet so easy to hide. She walked into school everyday, her long sleeves pulled down, and a fake smile on her lips. Everyday, a little harder to wake up, everyday a little harder to fake it, everyday…

a little harder to live...

One day, a boy approached this girl. He told her she was everything he ever wanted, and he became her whole world. The girl’s sleeves got a little shorter, and her smile a little more real. At school, they seemed happy together. Or at least, it seemed that way; at night, she cried. Cried for a boy who would never love her. She poured out her heart to this boy. She screamed “What if I told you, that without you, ‘my being would be a skeleton, a shell’”, and what did he do? He laughed, and laughed, and…

laughed...

The next day, she walked into school, her face with a little more makeup on, her sleeves a little longer, and her face a little more downcast. When her friends saw her and ran, with smiles on their faces towards her, she forced herself to smile and laugh. Even when they hugged her stomach and grabbed her arms, where all the scars and bruises hid.

Then, at the end of the hallway, there he was. Him. He loved her. He needed her.

But to her, he was the boy who, everynight, took her heart, and crushed it. Her mind raged like an ocean trapped in a raindrop. “Why doesn’t he love me? Am I not pretty enough? Maybe I’m not smart enough.” These thoughts began to consume her mind. 

So, she tried harder and harder to be what she thought he wanted her to be. She stopped eating, and she started to run. She ran for hours, hard, everyday. She used her pain and anger at herself as fuel. She began to think, “What if, ‘this dark passion that fills my every mood, takes over?’” It was that moment when she realized, it already had. 

One night, she grabbed a pen, and she wrote. She wrote everything. She wrote her feelings, her fears, and her experiences. She wrote about what he had done to her. She wrote how her heart is a forbidden kingdom, ‘the poles and spires and towers vapor-kissed’. She wrote how this boy had broken through. How he crashed through ‘the fortressed part through which great ships pass’, and charged into her castle. How he had saved her, only to have him say, “the tides, the wharves, the dens i contemplate, are sweet like a wanton’s love because I hate.’

Those words… they were enough. Enough to make her see, this wasn’t real love, it couldn’t be. So she told him. She told him everything. How she felt, and what she thought. Then, she told him she would be better off without him, and then she left. What he didn’t tell her, however, was that she was all he ever asked for. All he ever needed, she was his everything. He just couldn’t show it.

I once knew a boy…

A boy who loved a girl… But couldn’t show it...