I suppose I had hoped that my memory would’ve crippled you
Not to move on.
Instead, I see you smiling with your wife.
Your children remind me so much of you, with those
crooked smiles and messy curls.
I guess I just wished you had wanted those things with me,
Instead of her.
I break my phone’s screen so that I don’t have to witness your happiness
Without me.
By: Azzurra Nox
We met in July. I was there to see your bestfriend perform, but after the gig you asked me if I wanted to go out for ice cream. We soon found out that the only place that serves ice cream at midnight is a Denny’s Diner, so there we spent over two hours just talking about everything and anything. I loved listening to your voice. Your Texan accent was warm and inviting. We laughed like we had been friends forever.
It was perfect.
The first time you kissed me, you first stopped to kiss my nose. I smiled at the gesture. I thought that you were different. I thought that it felt nice to be in your presence. And my hand fit perfectly with your own, forever linked.
We were in Oklahoma hiding in the closet with a Tornado approaching our hotel room. My heart was racing, but you held me close and strummed your guitar, singing to me, “Riders on the Storm,” as the winds increased. Tears were streaming down my cheeks, I thought our building was going to lift up just like Dorothy’s home in The Wizard of Oz, and seeing my fear you held my hand and whispered, “We’re going to be okay. Even if this could be our final moment, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”
We were at a gas station in the desert when your bandmates were filling up the van’s tank and Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl,” came on the radio. You grabbed my hand, and singing the lyrics to me, pulled me out of the van. I laughed as we danced under the hot desert sun. Your crooked smile made me melt, and once again I thought that everything about that moment, about us, was perfect.
And for a while it truly was.
Until.
This is the part of the story where it takes a detour for the worst.
Until you grew weary of me wanting more. Needing more. And it crushed my heart when you handed me a ring for my birthday but punctuated, “It’s not the sort of ring you were hoping for, you know I’m not ready, yet.”
But that yet kept weighing on me. Was it really a yet, or were you just buying time? I began to believe that you didn’t care. I was certain that you were getting bored or maybe exhausted of me.
Then one February night, I saw my phone with all your texts and voicemails. You had spent most of the day trying to reach me because you were going to break up with me.
Something deep inside of me broke. And like Thom Yorke in “Karma Police,” for a minute there I did lose myself. I spent my nights driving around L.A. listening to songs on repeat as I tried to find a way to get back to you. I’d text you obsessively. Sometimes I was sweet, other times I was angry. I reached a point where I didn’t care whether the attention I was receiving from you was negative. I was starving for any tiny morsel. Your hate would’ve been better to me than your indifference. And all I could think about was how much I missed you. I started to hate you because I didn’t like this new person I had become. But at the same time, I didn’t know how to be different. I spent two years trying to forget the twenty months we spent together.
You hollowed me out. Sometimes, I feel as though if anyone peers closely into me they can see just how much I’m lacking. That they can see how all my cracks haven’t been placed correctly, that I’m not fixed. And maybe I never will be.
This is the new me. Not newly minted, but an amalgam of broken pieces haphazardly glued together, trying to pretend that I’m okay.
I’m okay.
I hope that wherever you are, you’re okay too.
Maybe if I had met him when I was older, I would’ve known that he was a beautiful disaster and that our so-called love was merely a one-sided obsession. But when you’re thirteen and you meet an older boy (he was seventeen at the time) with long, black hair who plays Beethoven in a way that makes your heart fall apart, well….you can’t help but feel like he’s the one.
I was a fellow pianist, such as him (although not quite as talented) and so that already made me feel as though we had something in common. So it was natural for me to suggest that he’d give me some tutoring lessons (which he had accepted to). My thirteen-years-old heart beat so fast you’d think I was close to a coronary. I was gonna be the first teenager to die of a burst-from-happiness heart.
Sadly, that happiness was very short lived.
Fast forward to when I’m seventeen. The Pianist and I are now not only friends, but I’ve managed to become a staple in his household. We’ve done Easter plays together, our families have spent holidays together, and we even planted a cactus together, my heart expanding every year when it’d bloom flowers, as though it were some proof of our unwavering love. But I was growing increasingly frustrated with my limited friend label. I wanted more. I wanted a mad love, stolen kisses, and passionate summer nights. I wanted ice cream dates, movie dates, and gazing at the stars.
Then his twenty-first birthday came around and for the first time that I had ever known him he was having a party.
“I hope you can make it tonight,” he told me, his dark eyes shining with a secret. “I’ve got something I want to tell you.”
My brain went through all the various scenarios of what he could possibly be wanting to tell me. Of course, the curse of being in love is that you’re always hopeful, and so I spent the day listening to a shitty love song (“Kiss Me”) on repeat while applying makeup and slipping into the very best little black dress I owned. I was determined to look memorable.
Fast forward to a few hours later when The Pianist is pulling me away from the crowd of friends saying that we need to go outside. I follow wordlessly. But nothing would’ve ever prepared me for what truly happened.
His girlfriend arrived and he wanted me to be one of the first people to meet her. I was too in shock to properly react. I numbly went through the motions of civil interaction as my heart cracked in two.
I then managed to escape the party. I didn’t have a car at the time and I didn’t want to tell my parents that I was abandoning the party, so I walked all the way home. And I couldn’t even cry as living in a small town everyone knows everyone and me walking down the streets in tears would’ve been all over town by morning.
At home the waterfall of tears fell in painful torrents. I pulled down all the photos we had together from my wall. And then I saw it.
The cactus.
In a fit of rage I hurled it against the wall.
If you were willing to kill my love, I was willing to destroy any evidence of it.
Years later, still in love, I found myself writing a lengthy email to the Pianist. I wanted to explain my love, how I never stopped believing cause I wanted to be that radical that Ola Salo sang about so much.
You want to know what he said to my emotional vomit?
GOODLUCK.
But I guess luck has never been on my side.
If I were lucky, I never would’ve met you.
By: Azzurra Nox
The Inkblotters 