The Feeling in My Chest
There are untold stories of deep emotional entanglements in all of us. Much of the time, we don’t realize their impact, pulsating under the surface even years after the fact.
Here’s a few of my times.
5th time:
Somehow I knew that letting him between my legs would change everything.
It isn’t about him, really. It is about 23-year-old men. It is about that chase, and that drive, and that me not really caring for a long time. And then the moment I do, they’re off.
They’re all the same.
I can see it in his uncomfortable gaze when I go to visit him at the store. It’s the afternoon after the first time we had sex.
“I’m just going through a lot right now. I have to get my shit together.”
Yeah, like stop snorting meth, I think to myself. But I am pissed.
“Fine,” I say.
“It’s not like I want to break up,” he says, with a slight but noticeable quiver. “Just slow down. I can’t be a good boyfriend right now.”
“Sure you can’t,” I reply. My chest begins to ache, but I stop it by walking out the front door of the liquor store.
‘Loser’, I mouth as I look up at the store’s sign and get into my car.
9th time:
My back is up against the laundry room wall, but I sit on top of a couple of pillows, as if I were about to meditate. It’s 1am.
“I don’t see any reason in talking about this again. It’s the same old shit.”
“But we say we’re going to try and work on things, yet we don’t really.”
“Christine, you see things in a really fucked-up way.”
I know he is right. But he can’t see I am right, too.
He gets up to leave, stands there for a moment, starts to say something, then continues out of the room, through the kitchen, and out the front door. I crumble over, from exhaustion more than anything else.
Just as I climb off the floor and onto the couch, the front door opens and there he is again, standing in front of me.
“I want you to know I opened my heart back up to you. And I’m fucking angry.”
He pauses. “I wanted you to know that.”
My chest starts pounding as he turns and walks out the door for good.
8th time:
Sitting on a bench, underneath a tree in a small green area next to a parking lot. Me, crying into his shoulder, my chest heaving; him with his arms around my waist. One of our last moment’s together, I already know.
A woman’s head pops out of the driver’s side window of her car, which directly faces us. She peers for a moment before pointing to the man in the passenger side of the car, and says, “52 years and counting. Good luck to the two of you.”
I look up at him, laugh through my still streaming tears, and am reminded that what can look like one thing to one person feels so completely and utterly different to another.
2nd time:
Sitting on a bathroom floor at the beach. He, of the first time, says, “I know it hurts.”
“But you don’t know. You’re happy,” I say, the words muffled through the ache in my throat. I remember crying behind the divider for our coats in the 7th grade classroom, right after he had asked in front of the class, “what if you’ve like…kissed a girl a lot, but don’t actually like her?” just as all eyes turned to me.
Now, he is consoling me.
“I know that kinda pain. I’m sure I’ll experience it again. I have before. But you’ll get through this. She feels bad for you, you know.”
I feel that pain in my chest, like a heavy iron is laying directly in the middle, left to burn through. Like I felt every morning after he, of this second time, started seeing her. Like every morning when my alarm goes off after I took the pills and had to go to the hospital and had to face my dad saying, “Don’t worry. I won’t tell your grandparents this happened.”
“I don’t give a shit about her,” I say.
“Well, she does feel bad about what happened. And he also feels bad. He just doesn’t know how to be friends with you.”
The cool tile of the floor makes my legs shiver, though the temperature outside had probably neared 100. A long, humid summer stretches out before 10th grade begins.
“We’ll never be friends,” I counter. “There’s just too much.”
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