beating

beating (n.)

beat·​ing | ˈbē-tiŋ 

1. act of striking with repeated blows so as to injure or damage. also : the injury or damage thus inflicted

2. PULSATION

3. DEFEAT, SETBACK

/

Elsewhere. It's only supposed to mean one thing, and that's that a thing is in another place. It was the last word I said to you, and I suppose it was apt, because we're both elsewhere for one another now.

I moved the bed next to the window, like you suggested, and now I'm lying between the linen sheets and the mattress pad I bought so that you could sleep better when you slept here. I think I like the change, though, and apparently “terracotta melange” does actually look rather nice in here, and - well, I haven't slept particularly well in the last few nights, so I'm hoping I get to sleep for a few more consecutive hours tonight. But from this angle, I can see the kitchen window, and the blinds aren't all the way down so I can still see the walkway, and there's a large part of me that can't unimagine the sight of you loping up the steps outside it, hands delved deep in your pockets, B’s tail beating away your side. I'd still smile the biggest smile if you did, and knowing that makes me want to bunker down even further between these new sheets and cry again. 

Yesterday morning, when the bed was the old way and the sheets were still hairy and there was still a wine stain under my pillow, I cried for the first time since Sonny attacked his ear back in October and I had had to rush him to the vet on a Sunday morning. That day was the day I sobbed in the sunshine, on one of the first cooler mornings of the winter, because the sight of my guy being so, so brave somehow bound my heart back into something that resembled something that loved purely again. And - I mean, yes, I guess I also cried when you were here the other day, but sober tears are different, and I cry them rarely. But still - I just couldn't shake the image of you standing outside my door, and I couldn't un-remember how thrilled I was to see you, and I couldn't un-feel how I wanted so badly to keep being thrilled by the simple fact that you're you.  I wanted the simplest of things: your voice, your mouth on my neck, the resonation of the two things wending their way down my side in the form of the goosebumps that delighted you. And yet - here we are, and my head dictates that I'm not allowed to keep wanting someone who doesn't want me back, so I've spent the last twenty-four hours doing an awful lot of cleaning and crying and cursing your name to my friends.

You really felt like the thing, you know. You texted me after that urgent, fervent first date of ours and you asked me, “WHO ARE YOU?” - and I laughed because it all seemed so serendipitous to me, too. You were everything I'd ever wanted, a Frankenstein’s monster of every man I'd ever loved, in all the right ways, and you were so inexplicably yourself in the process. You were transparent, and you were interesting, and you were kind, and you had calluses on your hands and and you didn't care that I was in my work clothes and you ate at the same breakneck speed that I do. After we slept together, I could see myself running my hands over your skin indefinitely, because I knew I'd find new scars and new hairs and new infinitesimal fragments of the portrait of you every time I did. It just felt like music, truth be told. The whole thing felt like music. There was a beat to what we had, a rhythm, an intangible loveliness that just worked in its own inexplicable way.

So, no, I couldn't believe you were a real person, either - but somehow you were, roaringly so - and you seemed just as bewildered by me as I was by you. Which is why - when you stopped by on that stupid afternoon and you sat upright in my bed and you started to cough up your words about how you and I needed to take it slow, after you hadn't seemed to feel the need to take anything slow at all, and how you and Stupid Lisa had been like “The Notebook,” after what was happening between you and I had felt like a fucking romance movie - I was livid. 

But I couldn't be livid for long, because I'm me. You were a person I wanted to understand, so I tried - hard, very hard indeed - to understand. We talked, and we came to an understanding of sorts, and then you stayed. And then we didn't talk about it again until we did, and then I blew up again, and then we talked again, and then - once again - we laid down in bed, and we didn't talk about it, and our mouths found one another instead. I thought that maybe we didn't need to talk about it any more. All I knew was the one thing: that you felt like the right thing.

And then you disappeared. And you seemed to think that that was “appropriate,” per your words. So, per my own, I asked you to just be elsewhere instead, because elsewhere seemed like a better place for you to be than to be sometimes there and sometimes somewhere you shut me out of entirely.

/

When Autumn and Taylor were here, just before the first time you became the new, clipped and cryptic you, we ambled down Highland and I told them about you. J, I told them. And he looked just like J-slash-D, too. I told them how strange it all was, how the coincidences had started happening again, and - I mean, yes, I knew you had said you'd wanted to heal over scars, not wounds, but I so desperately wanted people who felt like my people to collide. So I asked you to come. And you didn't come.

That had been the catalyst, and I'd genuinely been sorry about it. I'd been trying to make sense of so much for so long, and I still wasn't sure what to do with the thing that other people call hot and cold, the thing that I could only understand as a premature flatline, the thing that you call rational/logical/reality and then enmeshed/messy/possibly codependent. I hadn't known what to do with that statement, and I still don't know what to do with it. All I know is that it makes sense to lean into a situation with a person that feels right, because most people don't make a lot of sense to one another, and most people certainly don't make a whole lot of sense to me. But I also know that we did both make a hell of a lot of sense to each other, and that that was something I didn't want to cull. 

But then you'd have your days where you were silent. It was impossible to quantify, but it was there: you had your busy days, yes, the same way I did, but then you also had your moments of pure, impenetrable lockdown. And I just couldn't fathom how it was possible to be so present, so alive, so good and genuine to another human being who only wanted to be good and genuine back to you - and to just shut yourself away from someone who really, truly only wanted to be of help to you in any way she could.

The only thing I never said to you was to ask you how you'd feel if you'd been on the receiving end of any of this.

The thing is, I also know that you're smart enough to know what the amalgamation of everything you were giving me - and, of course, the lack of it - would amount to. I knew that you knew, deep down, that the sum of all the glittering glances and the offhand statements and the hands that moved to take mine, along with the upright conversations and the snappy sentences and the shutdowns would, ultimately, equate to white noise for me. And that fact - that fact, on it's stony, still, silent own - is the thing that's allowed my heart to slow down enough to sleep decently these past few nights. My friends told me you were a sociopath; I'm inclined to disagree, but your most particularly wilful ignorance doesn't prove them wrong. And marrying the trite, punctuated person who disappears off into the desert with the memory of the you who showed up and made me melt into pure nothingness has been - again, enough for a lot of fat droplets of salty water to wrench themselves down my sad, stupid face. 

So, no. I don't know. I don't fucking know. I suppose there's still a part of me that wants for you to lope up the steps and let me let you in, but that door is the same door that had had a bundle of tulips waiting outside of it with a slip of paper signed “j/d,” the day before Valentine's Day of 2020. That walkway still has smears of blue paint on it from a sign I painted on a bedsheet to welcome the very same man home from seven months spent in a different desert, before he yelled at me down the phone for having done so. That was the year my heart finally grew calluses; it was the year I learnt how to close doors, break connections, and forge the right thing for myself when my heart was absolutely, utterly, viscerally wrong about someone.

I just know that you were right, and that I heard you correctly, when you said I deserve the good stuff. And what we both know, full well, that a muscle that breaks apart and rebuilds is a stronger muscle, and that a heart that keeps beating underneath layers of scar tissue is a strong heart indeed, wherever it ends up.