Disintegration Of Platonic Love

disintegration of platonic love

for now, the day i’ve feared the most is here. i’ve tried not to think about how college is the end of high school friendships, how the moment i realized i could love again it’s about to disintegrate, how i cried on the phone with you six hours away, how nothing ever lasts. i’m not homesick, i am home.

i miss you.

the face and the body doesn’t count, i want the thoughts in your head and the feelings you experience and the shit you say to be closer to me. i want you in my passenger seat again.

i worry about him. i wish i didn't but i care too much. and i didn't know someone could care back.

and i should know better.

maybe he was right, love is the worst but its worth it for the good things it brings you.

haven't been writing lately. traded living in my head for living outside this body.

i read the first five pages of the surrender theory and thought i was god

the timeline of this all is fucking pathetic. i’m sitting, chilled, at white table, white walls, white computer, white clouds, massive windows coated in dead bugs and old spider webs. there was a man sitting in front of me but he left twenty minutes ago. there was a woman with a kind voice teaching english to a group of,,, i don’t know. i couldn’t see but i could hear them. i have my headphones on, have mentioned that i’m cold yet? a year ago today i bought flowers, and then maybe i thought to text you. two years ago today, i let the day slip past me with no physical way of remembering what happened three years ago today, crash, bang, smoke. and i couldn’t help but laugh. twenty four hours ago today, she got discharged from the hospital. its crazy seeing someone so healthy, someone you thought would live forever,,,,, she struggled to get out of her bed, she needed help using the bathroom. she’s high on the same painkillers her mother was addicted to. great, if she makes it out of this alive, she’ll have dementia when she’s ninety. god, why must there be so much death in one life? god, i’m looking for answers and i’m finding them all in the things you told me were blasphemous. i won’t defend you any longer, you’re lucky i’m still keeping up looks. a year ago a week from now, i think i texted you. i don’t know, it was something dumb like that. you blew off a halloween party to clean my room. not sure why you felt the need to help me out. i wasn’t so depressed then, i was far worse when i was begging the universe to keep us together. but its exhausting begging you to be good to me, its exhausting waiting for you to come around. i spend all my time in the past, i can see all the symptoms of convincing ourselves it was worth it, i can see it in you still, now. i won’t let a round three happen, but i keep having dreams about you. but i have no way of reaching out, i deleted everything that has to do with you. and i will keep it that way. its all up to fate to get us together again, but i will have moved on to greater things. did you know your left headlight is out? its not, but i liked the way it sounded. “i love you,” written on the back window, i know it wasn’t meant for me but it feels like its taunting me. like i said, the timeline of all this is fucking pathetic. i like to think i’ve gotten over dear s, but this really is all the same thing.

the poet has a one sided conversation with their journal:

shit luck, i can’t align this to the left.

shall i fall into old traditions?

bottling and obsessing, bottling and obsessing.

he knows. he’d have to be fucking helen

keller to not know. but sometimes he’s

so oblivious. so maybe he doesn’t know.

he says things, like,

“i’m going to pretend i didn’t hear that”

so he knows. he knows.

he knows the way i look at him sometimes.

the things i say sometimes.

i love looking at him.

thanks for noticing it before i did.

you gave me words for something

i never needed to know.

god, maybe i should end it.

but maybe its not so wise.

thanks for telling me i’m good at writing.

even when i know you’re lying through your teeth.

are you okay? are you okay? are you sure? look at me. are you okay? hey, only me. its only me. thanks for noticing something in the way i kissed you, something i didn’t even notice until you gave me words for the pain in my chest, the,,,, for now i’m stuck, chilled, second floor of this god forsaken library. isn’t heat supposed to rise? i want you to read this, i want you to love me like i’m convinced i love you, i want you to see me the way i see you. its so much easier to love yourself when you know you’re capable of being loved.

so much of the “love” word. you know what you’re capable of.

we’re so close to it, yet you keep letting me drag you closer to it. i’m letting you read my annotated copy of the perks of being a wallflower. if that isn’t a giant “i’m madly in love with you” then i don’t know what is.

i don’t even know who s is. is it you? is it me? someone else completely? i don’t know who i am (addressing anymore). i don’t know where you went or where these sentences were leading, i just love to hear the sound of my keyboard clicking.

warped lightning - леви 2023

a little something i'm proud of

yours truly

dear s,

i find it is so much easier to live when i “separate the art from the artist”. in this case, i imagine your kind loving words have taken the form of some anonymous, generic body, living in some anonymous, generic location, maybe with no face or anything like that. maybe you—

dear s,

don’t mind the blood stained seat, i slit my wrists so much the other night, i wanted to kill myself. i should donate this car to a forensics lab. cause of death: blood loss and chronic numbness. thank god leather is easy to clean. i told him about this. i don’t know why. i was dying to tell someone, like a sick victory. and he proceeded with caution, i could feel his concerned, almost disgusted look on his face, through the text. like maybe he could be angry.

“i’m sorry, i really shouldn’t have done this,”

“i would rather you talk to me and tell me the truth and make things a lil harder for me than for you to not say anything at all and i have no clue how you are”

how could someone genuinely care about me so much? i don’t trust this. feels like a joke, a game, something that will end in fighting and tears because that’s all i know how to do.

and dear s, the other day i cried in my car and i asked you to grab my stuff and bring it to me, and you did. and you stayed with me until you knew i was going to be okay. but i couldn’t stop hyperventilating, shaking, sobbing, it wasn’t a panic attack. i broke down crying in front of these three grown men. i don’t remember what any of them were saying, i don’t remember why everything ended the way it did, i just knew i was upset, and i don’t even remember being upset. but i felt pathetic collecting myself in front of them, so i made myself cry, but soon i couldn’t help it, and that’s maybe when i started panicking. when the shaking wasn’t voluntary, when the erratic breathing wasn’t a joke, something like that.

dear s,

i’ve recently started to realize my childhood wasn’t as golden as i originally thought. i didn’t think anything was wrong until my mother started to profusely apologize for being a terrible parental figure to me, for the awful things she did to me as a kid. and i didn’t get it until i tried to convince her otherwise, until she told me i hide my emotions, until i was on the verge of tears, screaming at her in a parking lot.

“you know the reason i hide my emotions? because when i was a kid, you’d scream at me and hit me if i cried! and you only got worse if i cried harder, and i’d cry harder because you kept hurting me. you know how many migraines i’ve had because you’d hit my head so much? you know half the scars on my arms are because of your own hands? so i cry silently, and i know how to zone out when you scream at me so i don’t cry, but sometimes you think i’m smirking, and you end up hurting me anyways. i walk on eggshells around you because i don’t want to get hurt”

quietly, she tells me, “see, i did mess you up.”

i don’t know what came over me but its all starting to make sense.

she tells me stories of how her father treated her as a kid, somewhat similar to my experiences as a kid. she tells me she was diagnosed with ptsd, but didn’t know why. and it wasn’t until i was in middle school that she started to understand it. by then it was too late to change the damage that was already done.

dear s,

i almost checked myself into a hospital. but what would they do? give me more meds, a slap on the wrist, and send me on my merry way?

“this has nothing to do with you,” you tell me, but i can’t help but feel that this is all my doing.

but hey, maybe we’ve changed so much we wouldn’t recognize each other if we saw each other again. nothing so special about “us”.

yours truly,

леви