Summary: They were everything and nothing. They were painful and joyous. They were heaven and hell. They loved and hated each other. The one that got away. AU AH to "The Loving Kind" by Girls Aloud.
Sometimes I watch you when you're sleeping,
I wonder what you're feeling,
Both wide awake and dreaming of yesterday,
I want you to kiss away the tensions,
The issues never mentioned,
With all the best intentions,
But you turn away
Her sleeping figure was the thing that haunted my dreams. It was still the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I had searched the world for something to equal it , but never found anything that came close. I could name every painting and sculpture in the Louvre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I can tell you that she was better. She was the art form that the greater world had not discovered yet. But I didn't want them to discover it. I wanted the image of her tawny hair fanned across a starkly conflicted white pillowcase in my mind, and my mind alone. I didn't want any other man to ever see it, experience the reverence of it, or ever convince himself that he loved her as powerfully as I did.
But we could never be a whole person together, no matter the pieces that we melted together. We were only three-fourths of what a person should have been. Or that was what we had believed. We were both too stubborn to let wholeness happen. We could be both everything and nothing to each other. We hated and loved each other at every turn, and usually at the wrong times. She loved me when I hated her, and she hated me when I loved her.
We were Kryptonite and Morphine. We made each other weak, tired, exhausted. We made each other's lives hell. We complicated the most uncomplicated of tasks. We spoke different languages, and tried to pretend as if we came from the same world.
The day she left had been a relief. I had lain in my boyhood bed and let a calm fall over me that seemed foreign at the time. I had let my soul be swept away into a Zen zone that I had not known existed. The absence made tension leave my shoulders, and I did not pinch the bridge of my nose for weeks. I let my life take a natural course, and simply lived within the world, instead of influencing it in any way. I let the control I had fought for when with her slip from my grasp. I let myself really feel everything that I possibly could. I let pain engulf me, happiness make me fly, humor tickle my insides, and my studies take over the free time in the middle.
But what we didn't understand then, and what it took me three years to realize, was that it was those things that made us work. It was our lack of perfection, the way we were always at each other's throats, the way we both loved and hated each other that made us what we were. We could not live without the love or the hate. Or at least, I couldn't.
Oh baby if you find I'm not the loving kind,
I'll buy you flowers; I'll pour you wine,
Do anything to change your mind.
I know you may be disinclined,
To find the love we left behind,
So kiss me then make up your mind,
I'm not the loving kind
He haunted every kind of dream I had. He invaded my dreams, my nightmares, my day dreams, the mirages I saw in crowded streets, and the insides of my eyelids. During meetings in the bleak conference room, and in my apartment filled with childhood photos of he and I on the swings, or camped out on one of our family's couches, or the group photo of us and our friends before our eighth grade graduation dance, the picture of me splattered with blue and white paint at our 10th grade homecoming game with his baseball letterman jacket around my shoulders and his arm wrapped around my neck, and finally our prom picture in front of the sad paper streamers and cardboard cutouts. Every memory I had of my childhood and adolescence was filled with him.
We had been each other's first everything; first friend in kindergarten, first fight in the sandbox, first boy-girl sleepover, first present on birthday's, first kiss, first date, first lover, first love. We had been the first one's to be each other's everything. We had been the sun that orbited each other's earth before most of our friends could even understand that blue and pink made purple. We had been the first to experience everything that a girl and a boy, a woman and a man, could experience together.
But that wasn't enough.
Being everything to someone else could only be trouble. Being everything to him was like trying to fill a circle with an equally sized square. We were both too pig-headed to last. We both wanted to always be right, to always be in control, always pick the movie, drive the car, and guide the other down the sidewalk. We wanted to be equals in every way, but it was impossible. Someone always had to be right. And neither of us could concede. And it was our downfall.
I would willingly give up all of that now. I would let him pick the worst possible film he could imagine, even Jurassic Park, which he knew would make me squirm all night. I would let him open the car door for me without complaint about my feminist rights. I would let him wrap his arm around my waist if it was what he wanted, and not complain that it made me trip more. I would let him take over every part of my life again. I would let my life be engulfed by him; my world pulled in and disappearing within his black hole.
I'd do anything, sing songs that lovers sing,
If I could change your mind,
Am I not the loving kind?
I'd do anything, sing songs that lovers sing,
If I could change your mind,
Am I not the loving kind?
Everything I was with Tanya was not what I had been with her. I was two separate people trapped in a single body. I was the person I had been with her, the person that could live life with a carefree smile, childhood memories, and love that was all-consuming.
And then I was who I had been since her; the person who pasted a smile on his face to prove everyone's assumptions of depression wrong. I was a person filled with falsity. I had a fake smile, a fake laugh, a fake relationship, fake friendships, fake plants in my apartment, and an agonizingly fake stability in my life.
No matter what, no matter the negative things it brought to my life, the fighting, the convoluted mental conflict, the torturous war of wills, I would trade every single fake thing in my life for a moment more with her. Just a minute alone, a minute to explain, to give her the things that she had always wanted and deserved from me, and to be completely fearless in my proclamations for once in my life would be enough to set me at ease. If it fixed us, melded our lives back into the harmony that it had once been then it would be the greatest thing I could ever do. But if it was a fruitless act that was rejected and laughed upon, then I would know I had tried. I had attempted and failed to reform my life to the happiness it had once been instead of knowing my own cowardice, knowing that I was too afraid to attempt to bring back my own euphoria.
But I was too cowardly to seek her out. I had asked my secretary for her address and phone number months before, but I had not acted. I had held the weathered Post It in my hand every single night for weeks before I hid it away in my wallet, only to take it out and stare at her name etched across the florescent paper, repeating it over and over in my head at ever lunch break. I repeated her address and phone number enough times to have it committed to memory, but I still kept the Post It with me, afraid that if I actually got up the nerve to call her, my nerves would make me forget the telephone number.
It was not because of Tanya. I wished that it was. I wished that I was being noble. That I wished not to hurt the woman who had committed herself to the shell of a person that I had become, but it was not. I could have broken up with Tanya at any time. We both saw it coming, and when she finally ended it, neither of us were at all surprised. She asked me if there was someone else, and I honestly told her that there was not. She did not believe me, and I didn't blame her. But even after Tanya and I were done, I did not call her.
Somewhere on a Monday morning,
In a rush hour of another day,
Standing on a crowded platform, carelessly we lost our way..
Sometimes I watch you when you're sleeping,
I wonder what you're feeling,
Both wide awake and dreaming, of yesterday.
Seeing him for the first time in five years was like finally finding the puzzle piece that had fallen off the table into the plush carpet. It was a feeling of overwhelming completion that had eluded me my entire adult life. It was a freedom I had never experienced. A stripping of every stress I had ever packed inside my body. It was walking around my house naked with the windows wide open for everyone to see, and not being the slightest bit ashamed. It was warm chocolate chip cookies and cold milk after a scraped knee. It was a mother's love and a lover's touch.
He did not see me. I was behind him, after all. But I could not mistake his mop of unruly hair, or the way his nose looked uncommonly regal in his profile. People continually walking into my view of him, but I did not even blink. It was like static over a familiar song on the radio. I sang every word anyway.
It was early on a Monday morning, on a rare Monday on which I was not working. I had taken a train on a whim into the heart of the city. I wanted to lose myself thoroughly in the hustle and bustle. I wanted to forget my name, my address, the way I would feel the need to cry whenever I stepped into my apartment and saw his photo repeated over and over again before my eyes. But I had found the only thing that could have been better.
I attempted to step towards him. To make it all better. To make my puzzle pieces fall back together. I would glue them together and hang them in a frame in my living room like my grandmother had done in her old age. I would point to that puzzle in its gold-gilded frame every day and feel pride engulf me for the difficulty that it had given me, but that I had kept going to the finish. I would be proud that I had not broken and quit, and that there was now a piece of art to display proudly to the world in return for my perseverance. I could show it to my friends with a secretive and coy smile, and see their expressions turn. We could be that piece of art; that puzzle with 10,000 pieces that had given us all that difficulty, but that was eventually worth every moment of broken tranquility.
But then he touched my shoulder. Jacob did. He touched me, and I jolted from the dream-like trance that I had lost myself in. He led me towards our waiting taxi, the chariot that would pull me away from my prince, and I lost sight of the thing that had made me feel complete. The crowd of generic brown hair so similar to my own engulfed his heavenly mane of bronze tendrils, and I lost him again. I felt it in every particle of my body, as if it had happened all over again, and I was realizing the magnitude of his absence the way I had on that day in my third year of college.
Oh baby if you find I'm not the loving kind,
I'll buy you flowers; I'll pour you wine,
Do anything to change y our mind.
I know you may be disinclined,
To find the love we left behind,
So kiss me then make up your mind,
I'm not the loving kind
I'm not the loving kind,
I'm not the loving kind
Her face was unmistakable. It was a sheet of porcelain shaped into a form that Botcelli himself could not have created on his best day. I knew that today was her birthday, it was a day that was indefinitely engraved into my mental calendar, but she did not look a day older than the eighteen year old that had left my bedroom for college. I remembered the pained expression she had worn, and I now wondered if I had been meant to follow her. If I had followed her out the door the afternoon, walked her to her car even, would it have changed everything? Would our last fight, the same fight that we had over and over again about our futures, have mattered? Would it have blown up into the dramatic silent battle that had ended both our relationship and friendship in one foul swoop like it had? Or would we have kissed and made up on the driveway of my childhood home, as we had many times before?
I saw the man, the man she was with, the man that was living the dream I had dreamed for years, fumbling with the box in his pocket. I saw it when she did not. She simply continued reading her menu, talk softly to her companion, and smiling softly into her glass of wine. I knew what he was going to do, what he was planning on taking away from me that night. I knew what he planned to do, and what that box held, and I could not watch it happen. I could not watch the only thing that mattered in my life fall willingly into the arms of another man. I could not watch her accept his proposal, watch her pledge his life to him, and watch her publicly prove that I was the furthest thing from her mind.
I jumped from my seat, my chair falling back into the table of the patrons behind me, and gaining the attention of the two friends I was dining with. I was standing, and getting several odd glances from my friends, the diners in the table that I had rammed my chair into, and several other people at the tables directly around us. But I had eyes only for her and her companion.
I saw him rise from his chair. He walked slowly and purposefully towards her. She watched him with curious and confused eyes. I watched him take a deep breath, and then fall gracefully to his knee. Her eyes grew to the size of saucers, and I swiftly began a path from my position across the floor towards her. My legs moved of their own accord, my mind several step behind my movements, and I never removed my eyes from her face.
Her eyes traveled upwards from her kneeling boyfriend as I approached, her eyes searching frantically through the room for anything other than what was transpiring in front of her. Did he not realize how much she would have hated a public proposal? How much she detested publicity of any kind? Going on bended knee at the most expensive Italian restaurant in the city came with a guarantee of public attention. It was exactly what she would hate, and what would make her uncomfortable. How could he possibly not know that if he wanted to marry her?
She frantically looked from face to face, table to table, light fixture to light fixture, searching for a place to safely rest her eyes. And then she found me. Her eyes scanned from the scarlet carpet at my feet, upwards over my shoes, my legs, my hips, my chest and arms, my neck, and then finally to my face. She blinked, as if she expected me to disappear, and then looked directly into my eyes. I was floored by the intensity of the gaze. It was both powerful and timid, sultry and loving. It personified the walking contradiction that our relationship had been, and most likely would always be.
"Will you marry me, Bella?" The man asked, his voice dark and deep with affection and adoration. I had a moment's hesitation; a brief thought that he may love her as much as I did. That I was taking away from this man, the man that she had chosen, the one thing in both of our lives that actually meant anything to us.
Her mouth fell open slightly, her lips, the bottom still slightly too large for the top, falling open in a small O. Her vision skipped from her date, her possible fiancé, to me, and back again, over and over again. I saw the shock, the love, the hate, the familiar fire and ice. I wondered if she shared a similar relationship with this man, if she was as difficult with him as she had always been with me. Were we equals in her eyes? Or was he better? Or, I didn't dare to hope, was I the victor in our battle for her heart?
Her eyes filled with tears, and her line of sight settled directly in between the two of us, at our line of meridian, and said the two words that could confuse, thrill, and torture me more than any others. "I can't."
Oh baby if you find I'm not the loving kind,
I'll buy you flowers; I'll pour you wine,
Do anything to change your mind.
I know you may be disinclined,
To find the love we left behind,
But kiss me then make up your mind,
I'm not the loving kind.
I'm not the loving kind,
I'm not the loving kind
Author's Note: This little thing goes out to my friend Shim, and my Beta/Friend, Alicia (AdabellaCullen). Shim inspired this story by being the most frustrating best friend+ that I could ever have, and Alicia is just the awesome-ness that has inspired, contributed, and edited everything I've done in the past few months... Hope you guys enjoy it... And I wish you all a Happy Mothers Day!