Graphic: Hearbeating Andrew Mazariegos-Ovalle/The Olaf Messenger
I fell in love at two in the morning. It echoed up the staircase, saccharine and fatal. I met it at the helm and beckoned it closer. Strike me dead.
I knew I loved him the first time I saw him smile. I knew it was love when I began to put his face on every other set of eyes I encountered. I became acquainted with his friends; I joined clubs I didn’t care about. I didn’t discover his name until a week later. He claimed the prize for the web I masterfully spun around him. We became best friends, an entirely dissolved identity. Each lazy afternoon we picked ourselves apart to share with each other, like assembling the pieces of two puzzles and somehow making one picture.
Happiness is a moniker for insanity. I couldn’t feel the straight jacket tightening around me until my hands were bound and the key was flaunted in my face. The harbingers of heartbreak appeared to me in dreams. They taunted me with the ecstasy of my hands in his hair, his head laying on my crossed legs, his secret smile to disguise what he really wanted to say: “I love you.”
And I was satisfied — if anyone were to ask — elated to cry in unlit corners at night, joyous to root my entire being in someone else, ecstatic to let myself forget how to be alone. I had been so fixated on the idea of happiness that I was completely distracted from my suffering. I forgot it wasn’t normal for tears to entice me to sleep and for envy to finish my homework and fold my laundry.
I almost kissed him in the library. I almost kissed him on the floor of my dorm. I almost put my hands in his hair as if to ask, “am I yours?” Almost. Almost. Almost.
I stepped on Cupid’s landmine and gutted everyone around me. I ignored how he danced to Love’s rhyme and verse. Invisible to me, the arrow through his chest already had two initials inscribed in its wood. Their waltz kicked me to dusty corners where I could only write with dead pens on tea-stained paper:
“Dearest Father,
I don’t think I can survive this war. Do you know how to get the blood stains off my skin? I feel remorse for my actions this past year. I’ve thought about nothing more than going back to that November night, closing the stairway door, and coming back home. Do you understand me? I wish I wasn’t ashamed to tell you how many tears I’ve spilled so you could help me wipe them up. I’m scared you’re disappointed in me. Will you read this letter?
Crawling to your door once again,
Your daughter.”
