2004-02-04
You killed me
What an odd day today. I saw him, and it's been several days since we last embraced, and I last left him shivering from my cold approach. Usually we would stop to talk, and he would look at me with his sardonic smile and say something witty and charming in the most unusual manner.
Today was different. I'm telling you that I didn't notice him...I didn't even know that it was him until I looked once more. He did acknowledge me, but he did not stop to greet me.
I am beyond grave when I say this--he had a look of pain in his eyes. It's a look that I couldn't really describe, because it's one of those martyr-like gazes filled with pain and self-compassion. That killed me.
Not that I have lost him as the object of my affections, but now I have lost him as a friend. I tried to ignore it for the remainder of the day, but I couldn't erase him out of my mind. It's one of those things that truly inspires the urge to cry, but the tears refuse to show. Inside though, I am restless with anger and frustration, because I was never able to let him get near me in that sort of way. He knows that I want to distance myself away from him--he knew it from the moment that I returned his warm embrace with a cold greeting. It's for the best, I will hurt him at the end, and after all, I am a difficult person to love.
But this feeling persists inside me, and does not permit my peace. The thought about him and I becoming estranged is not so painful, but seeing him was the worst punishment that I could ever ask for. It hurts him...I hurt him. He doesn't deserve this, and I don't think that it's fair that he had to live in Roger's shadow from the moment he saw me.
Sometimes I imagine what he thought about me initially when I walked into the class that morning. I remember him always trying to say something to me, but it never came out correctly, or he'd just pause and leave. So I would stand there and wonder who that guy was. Then, we met through David, and we began to talk, and we walked together under the rain, and I used to find that painful because he wasn't Roger. His patience ran out and he gave up, because he thought--well, I really don't know what he thought.
Life can be so beautiful and yet so void. Like a sleepy summer that looks like antique brown, and you lie in a hammock with your bare feet touching the ground. You look around and see dried roots springing up all over the place, and you see those small yellow butterflies dance in pairs. Scott and I used to walk home during those times, and then David and I walked, and then I began to walk alone.
For heavens sake, there's nothing in me to kill anymore, because I am already dead and buried. Is it right to feel so bitter at only seventeen? Sometimes I wonder why I even behave the way that I do.
Do you know what I really want to do? I want to go barefoot in a field filled with dried leaves and begin to sleep. I want to sleep, and I want to break the glass that confines me.