Pretend

by MissPopularMIZ

J/S

It's hard. It's hard and I'm drunk. Poor me. Poor Sam, I hear you mumbling. Guess what? I don't care anymore. I'll pretend I was never in love with you and you'll pretend you were never in love with me. Let's play a game. Can it be a role-play one, Jack?

Let's play perfect lover and his mistress. Let's play 'feel used and discarded after you went to your wife's arms'? Or are we going to play 'love you 'til the end of time but I can't be with you because of all the bureaucracies and my apparently (not)-perfect family'?

Shall I start? Don't feel screwed. I can't feel anymore. Not even humiliation because it's 2 o'clock in the morning and I'm knocking at your door, screaming and crying to the moon how much I hate everything in the world and your neighbours are looking at me. Not even pain as I see your wife, in the veranda, enveloping your waist and your naked form pondering either to kill me or… kill me. For what? For destroying your/her life and for the love I stole from you.

Fuck. What's happening to me? How much love did I begged my soul to give you? How much tears will come down until my tea get could? Jesus Christ, Jack, what happened to me? How much of a fool was I to let you slip away? How much of a hope-waiter was I to become addicted to you? Just then, you left me alone in the dark street of your thought and I sank, my heart shattered.

Don't call me 'honey', or 'sweetheart' or… whatever you may feel to call me in the blank of 'our' life. It's over, isn't it? No? Are you sure? Maria is barking something at me, but I don't want to hear it and I don't care. You're staring at me, rubbing your eyes as if I'm something you're seeing for the first time or a ghost from your past (wait a minute, I'm a ghost from your past! Ah…). Thus it's real, you think I'm crazy.

You're wrong… I'm in love.

With you. Shit! I'm in… love? Oh – MY- GOD! I can't believe it. Is it so hard to understand what am I feeling? I ask myself for the 102nd time in thirty-five minutes. Am I sick? Am I good to the asylum? Oh yeah, I am…

I don't care what people think! I don't care about her. Maria is a pain in the ass, if you permit me… And I'm crying and you're staring and your neighbours are judging us. And Maria is encircling you. And your daughters are… are… pretending this world doesn't exist… Pretending they locked the world they see from their bedroom window outside and thrown away the key. And they are right. We pretend. We pretended. We will pretend.

With every word I hear from you, I bounce. Like a ball, a ping pong ball. Left, right, left, right,… and that all over again, and again, and again. Life's like that. We aren't different from the stereotype. As you may see.

Love is who I lost, not what I found. And in the end, it doesn't really matter. Who you love, who you hate. We are dust and I'm drunk. I'm drunk because of me, not because of you. I miss 'us' but again, it's not in my power to stop the planet from colliding.

Sober, austere and severe I despise love stories, I'm not 6 anymore to play 'perfect life' and 'barbie sam's perfect life' and you're not 16 any more to be playing 'love me, love me not, in the end, who did I forgot?'.

You know, sometimes I hate you. I hate you. I hate you. Because you… give me so much pain and push me aside. Oh Jack, what did I miss? Why did I fell in love with, precisely, you? Why not Danny, or Martin, or Vivian? Okay, I must be reaaally drunk… And after breaking my beer bottle in your door, I was able to take a look at you and wonder why the pain wasn't enough to make me stop loving you.

Jack. The word sounds so right. Jack and Sam, Sam and Jack. Samantha and John Michael. John Michael and Samantha Malone. Oh, I love it! And it could be this way. It's so… damn right… And when I thought I could never get tired of love, it disappeared. And as love went away, the only things I had left were empathy and the empty. I felt lost. I felt alone. And you, you were with her and you were feeling the same. Why didn't we found an association, something like 'discarded-anonymous-of-that-stupid-and-harsh-pain-that-is-love'? By this time, we would be rich and have, at least, half of the world as a member. I want to get lost in something other than loss.

Why am I here? Why am I this way? Because you made me do this. You know, if you weren't married to Maria, we could have had… Oh, are you saying we can have something? …a thing?

Wait, let me make up my mind. It's not that I like to dwell on the past but, with 'ifs' we could have built a new life and a whole new world.

Past this state of mind, did you know that, after we first broke up and when it really wasn't a habit (as it occurred to me that we were always in this impasse) I thought suicide would be sweet compared to the hell I was (and am) living here? And it wouldn't be like when I told you I tried to escape from home and my mom found me. No, this time, I would have made it hard.

Don't you understand? We pretend every day life is perfect. And you pretend every day that either you love me or Maria, not both. Moreover, love and dream are just wastes of time. Like words: cheap philosophy. Everybody as something to say, always from a magazine, always about your life. They really think they can mask it, but it's so cliché. So many times we hear that, when someone says it in front of you for the 48th time, all you want to do is fumigate them in the air.

My mom, although everything, used to tell me a bed-time story everyday about beautiful princesses, charming princes, evil vs. good and all that stuff, all that junk, and how harsh and confident we needed to fight for our dreams to come true. She never would have guessed I felt in love with you. For her, 'girl that meets married guy with two children and have an 'affair' while he is cheating on his blind wife that thinks he is working late the night in his office while he is actually having a glass of Pinot Noir and copulating for eternity with his mistress, his junior, for real and everybody knows' would have been classed as something that people with no education and no morality, like 'those women who sell pleasure and will go to hell, where they will be judged' do, not what her beloved daughter would… God bless us… Woe betides it. As if every fairytale comes real…

But she never thought I needed to find a way in this lonely world, as it being the side-effect for every girl. Well, Mama, I don't and I'm way too old to believe in kings, queens and all that mushy crap. Even if I dreamed of that when I was innocent and not a bitch, dreams are never worth the pain.

And later I found that memories don't keep you warm at night. Not even if you are covered with a blanket. Jack! I fitted your arms so right… And you smelled and tasted so good… Your moans compensated me for living life amongst the shadows… In my most modest opinion, we were meant to be. No, we ARE meant to be… And when I take a look at you now, with Maria, I ask me what may I have made to make my dreams be nothing but shadows.

'I must not be in love with you' should be my new mantra. Something that keeps me from drowning in your scent. Something that keeps me secure from your power to hypnotize me. Analyzing my feelings, you know I can't pretend. And if I pretended, the look in my eyes would betray me. The things I see when I look at the girl in the mirror are similar to those I see when I look into Maria's eyes. Similar, Jack, not the same.

You know our love is too strong to be jailed and forgotten. And as I'm trying to forget it, to turn another page in my life, somewhere deep in the abyss, love is disdaining of me.

Yesterday, everything was so much easier. Love was a simple and mere game we used to play with only one rule: Maria shall not discover about whatever may happen between us. And we would play until the end. And today, you take it away from me. Who do you think you are? Because she couldn't feel, because she felt too much you give it all to me?

Mr. Malone, I'm not an alcohol addicted, I swear! And I swear you that unrequited love really sucks. And it has been three hours I've been crying at your door, I only wish you, or the rain, to come down and wash away my tears.

And a new day must come as the anterior ends, just like the love you felt for Maria. Promise me.

Promise me tomorrow will be different. Promise me I will have you in my bed. Show me love. All my life, I was only waiting for a 2nd chance. Shut up, Maria. Did you knew sometimes words aren't enough, no matter how wonderful they are? Do I disgust you? Please, picture me fucking Jack hard and letting him do to me those things you never let him do. Not only while we are having sex, but the simple pleasure to make crosswords on the bed. I'm begging you Jack, come and make love to me. And you, the mister in the blue flannel pyjamas in the apartment just above Jack's, stop staring at me like if I was a dessert.

Jack, if you knew how much I want to be a risk you take… If life was a book, who wouldn't sign for love? People change as our conception of life. And you want to know why I'm here? Because I'm tired. Because I'm drunk. And because I felt in love with the only guy I shouldn't: my married boss…

I'm here, today, to be close to you. I'm here today because I couldn't bear the thought of you alone with a wife you don't love anymore. Yes, love vanishes quickly. I'm here to pretend everything is going to be okay. I'm here because I was alive and felt dead. Because you aren't here with me, instead with her.

I see you disappear and the next thing I know, you are by my side. You hug me, kiss my forehead, and repeat murmuring something inaudible to my ears. I relax, collapse in your arms and we fall onto the street, between the cars that belong to the physical world. Maria keeps pretending it's nothing with her. We keep pretending it's not wrong what we do. We keep pretending. People keep pretending… And tomorrow we will pretend yesterday was fine.