What I Tell Myself About Love

There are two that mock me: my heart and him. There's the real him that goes about his day, ignorant of me, busying himself with himself and others (others than me).

He may have modeled the Botani. I don't know. Oh, and this is in a game called World of Warcraft (Blizzard). I only thought I saw him walk like a Botani at his gym. I thought I saw him in a red convertible, pulling in front of me and my mother years ago. Yeah, that's it. That's a lot easier on me than its being him. That's easier than believing his parents retired here, like so many do, and that he visits them. New Hampshire, New York, Florida. I don't know where he is.

I know he has a daughter who was born when he was forty-nine. I know I still remember his birthday.

I know he's five-foot-eight, fifty-nine, has cerulean blue eyes that turn green in the sunlight, likes cats, likes classic rock, has a Terminator haircut (the 80s original), has The Flash as his favorite superhero, learned boxing from his uncle, likes to tinker with watches, wears an eight to eight and a half men's shoe, lets his New Hampshire accent through sometimes (it's so CUTE), has the build of a soccer player, has vanilla-caramel skin (the lucky bastard naturally tans), has an aquiline nose, has scars (right temple, left side of mouth), has a widow's peak, has a sardonic/ironic arch to his eyebrows, has the most distracting smile, and is insufferably lovable no-matter what he does wrong. He also once made me laugh with a joke about hanging people up to dry from bike hooks on the ceiling.

My heart mocks me because his memory mocks me, and I yell at both because I get in my head. The him in my head wants to marry me when I want to be beautiful, and flirts with me when I want to be invisible. He's rather contrary that way. Then, I get mad while my heart starts to cry and I want to toughen up against the world and him. It doesn't work.

The him in my heart sometimes represents other men, sometimes represents him alone. All that I wish I could say and didn't to him comes pouring out of me. All of my truth I didn't get to tell him.

My heart wants to tell him I love him. My anger wants to tell him I'm the fallout of his rejection of me.

My heart wants to tell him I miss him. My anger wants to push him away, to reject him in kind. Part of me wishes he could suffer as I've suffered over him, but then my heart reminds me I wouldn't truly wish that. And it's right. I wouldn't. Sometimes I think it knows me too well.

My heart's sneaky that way. It's also more stubborn than I'd like to think I am.

I'd love to feel nothing; not the sting of rejection; not the pain of regret. Like in that song by Edith Piaf, I'd love to regret nothing, to not care, to not give a crap about the past, but there's my heart to contend with. That and my memory.

Like in that other song by Simon and Garfunkel, I would love to keep myself guarded from pain by introversion. I'd love to be my own fortress. I'd like to kid myself that I am. But I'm not.

I feel weak in crying. But it's still better than yelling at a past I can't change.

Can't. What a vexing, halting word.