April 26th

"Falling Hard"

I'm in too deep.

As I type these words, on the phone held between my left shoulder and my ear, my boyfriend is telling me about how his life is filled with nothing but greedy assholes (his parents) and selfish brats (his sisters). He told me that he wants to lift some money and two credit cards from his mom, swipe his dad's car keys, and kidnap me so we can run off and live with one another for the rest of our lives. He's crazy. He's absolutely out of his mind to think that we could pull off something like that. He sounds so desperate to run away from our biological families to live a life of pure romance between one another, but I know he won't do it, but this is how we talk. We're obsessed. With each other? With love? With the idea of it? I have no idea, but I love every second of it. I love knowing that my boyfriend will abandon his future just to take care of me, just like he loves knowing that I will easily steal my mother's diamond necklace to pawn to pay off his hospital bills. It's sick, but we're obsessed.

I'm in too deep. I can't get out. I don't know if I want too either. All I know is that this will either come to be the best thing in my life or we will inevitably crash and burn into a zillion pieces of ash. If I told this to my boyfriend, he would come up with some romantic way to say that our ashes will float away in the wind together or some shit like that. It disgusts me. It makes me love him more. What did I just say? I'm in too deep.

Now he's going on about the teachers in school who tell us to stop making out in the middle of the hallway. They say we're not soap opera stars, so there's no need to break into a dramatic staredown as we depart from one another to our respective classes. I told him I agree, but do I? God, I fucking love it when I look into those white moons. It makes me feel like it's night time, like it's a dream, like we're a dream. And I just want to cling to that soft glow forever, but then a calloused hand runs between our loving gazes and tells us to 'skedaddle.' I would do anything to be with him. And I have. I played hooky for classes I had tests in to see him. I lied to my mother at a family dinner and said I have an emergency with a friend. I shed fake tears in front of her, only to dry them up as I walked down the driveway where he was parked with his father's car. I hopped in and we rode down to the park. He pulled me into the back seat which was covered in rose petals, his attempt of trying to make car sex more romantic. I skipped out on the last hour of work for him to take me out to a foreign film and shared vegan cupcakes with him. It's fucked up. I shouldn't be doing any of these things for him. Love is love, but obsession has a line that I've, we've clearly crossed.

I don't have any friends anymore. I abandoned them for Neji. I gave up friendships I've had since I was in fourth grade because they thought I spent too much time with him. They said it was an unhealthy obsession and that Neji was mentally unstable. They said that he did this with all of his exes. I told them to fuck off and I never looked back. I wish I had because I have no one to tell this to but those who are reading this.

Tell me, do you know how to stop drowning when you don't know how to swim? It's difficult unless you can miraculously learn enough to swim to shore. And if you can't, you're dead, right? Will I die? Maybe not exactly, but I'll get pushed to a certain point where I can't come back to normality. Just me sitting in my computer typing this, I see the white of the computer screen and I see Neji's eyes. I look down at the brown desk where it's resting and there's Neji's hair. I can look at a plate of food and see Neji eating whatever is on my plate. I have a feeling many of you reading this are probably thinking, "Oh, it's just puppy love," well, fuck you. Puppy love doesn't make you spend your entire paycheck on a fake ID, a bottle of absinthe, an absinthe spoon, and sugar cubes in one night just because your boyfriend asks you to get some for him because he needs inspiration for his next cockamamie philosophical essay on human behavior. Obsession does. Total and utter dedication to these goddamn voices in my head that tell me to please Neji.

Now a new set of you may be going, "Whoa! What the fuck, man? You're crazy/If you know it's wrong, why haven't you stopped?" I repeat, how do you stop drowning if don't know how to swim? Right now, I can't swim. I'm pathetically attempting to wade and breathing in more water every fucking minute. I can't stop. I can't stop loving him no matter what I do. I try to pull away from him when he tries to kiss me in front of the homophobic principal, but then that soft hand touches my face and there we are, swapping spit with the man glaring at us. We get detentions, but we sit right next to each other on that Saturday morning, using our secret code to tell each other messages. We walk out of the school hand in hand with the principal looking at us, ready to write us up again, and it doesn't matter to either of us. We're still going to go back to my house and recite love poems we made up as we touch each other. Are you nauseated enough? I'm telling you the truth though. We're so infatuated with one another that I don't think we live in reality anymore.

Neji once called me five minutes after one of our first dates and told me how much he missed me. It was our fourth date. That should have been a sign that this was wrong, that he had to have a screw loose to fall so fast for me, and yet I smiled and told him I missed him too. Why? I don't think I did miss him. But do you know what I did miss about him? The way he looked at me. The way his eyes watched my hands as they lifted my soda can to my lips or how I ran my fingers through my hair. How he held my hands as he taught me how to properly swing the mini golf club without sending my ball into the water. His smile against my ear and the way he said 'beautiful.' He said it after a lot of the things I did that I thought were awkward or embarrassing. It made me feel great about myself and to get that call saying that he missed me blinded me to reality. He wanted me so bad and as a result, I wanted him just as bad.

I went on a vacation with my family to the next state over for a week. I gave Neji my cell number to call me if he missed me or needed to talk to me. He called every day, sometimes as much as four times a day. I called back on times I missed him. He left messages saying how his heart felt so empty without me around, that the distance was killing him, that I needed to be with him every day. I repeated his words back immediately. How could I not miss a romantic man like that? He sounded like he was falling into a depression without me. I was happy. I was glad that he felt like the world was collapsing without me. There's no better feeling than knowing that someone's happiness resides on you. Then when you're are the point that I am, you realize, there's something wrong knowing that someone's happiness resides on you.

One night, I got a call at three in the morning from him. Neji asked me if I ever felt like I was suffocating without him around. I asked him what he meant. He said, 'I think of you like air. I need you to survive. I need you with me at all times. Without you, I'd asphyxiate. Without you, I'm a corpse.' And instead of saying he was a psychotic, I pegged him as a hopeless romantic like I was. A guy who liked to dramatize his love and boy, was that a dramatic confession.

I am a hopeless romantic, but Neji turned me into an obsessive romantic. If I'm not working or doing schoolwork, I'm looking up love stories to compare our relationship to. I'm daydreaming about our lives as husband and husband with a nice house and children. Sometimes I find myself making little trinkets and gifts for him or compiling love songs to burn onto a cd, then record onto tape. When I'm by myself, it becomes all about missing Neji and when I'm with him, it's all about us. This point is further proven by this entire entry I'm writing. I could have written about anything else. I could have written about my mother's impending engagement to this man I barely know or my sister's constant fights with my brother over cleaning up the bathroom or the fact that I'm failing this school year from spending so much time with Neji. Instead, I'm writing about him because he's all that matters right now. I don't want it to be like this. This isn't love. This is addiction and it's eating at me from the inside.

I don't want to give him up though. After being treated like such a fucking God, who will I meet that can treat me the same? Who would be willing drop everything to massage my feet after work with a simple phone call? Or who could ever spend their Christmas money buying my favorite expensive hair care products? Most importantly, who would be able to come over at whatever hour of the night and cradle and comfort me when I have nightmares about my father's car accident? I can't imagine anyone but Neji doing it.

Do people hold love interventions? I could use one now. Someone to grab me by the wrists and shout at me, tell me how big of a mistake I'm making by holding onto this poison. My friends didn't stick around as tough as they should have, so I need strangers to drag me away from the situation that I enabled.

Neji just told me he's coming over my house, so I have to end this here. I don't know what I'm going to do, but I know that this can't last any longer. I'm going to burst. Whether it's an all out mental breakdown and throwing myself at him with all my might or ending this before he literally makes us run away together, I hope it turns out alright. I do not want a Romeo and Juliet ending.

- Gaara Sabaku

A/N: I'm semi considering making this a brief series, but I like it as it is. If you think otherwise, let me know in the reviews. Thanks for reading.