Thanks for being awesome. xo
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February 20, 2013 – Word Prompts: Beguile, belittle, bewilder
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In the end, I'm able to escape Esme's invitation to join the pseudo-rehearsal-Thanksgiving dinner, and I use Charlie's distaste for even remotely formal dinner parties as the excuse. Instead, I shut myself in my bedroom after we've gorged ourselves on turkey and stuffing and lose myself in nearly-forgotten mementos, things that mattered once upon a time, and try to figure out why this one thing still matters so very much. I'm faintly amazed by how much stuff still remains in my old bedroom, equal parts surprised Charlie hasn't chucked it out and surprised at how much I left behind. How much I ran away from.
Eyeballing my bookshelf, I spy the small row of yearbooks on the top shelf and stretch to my toes, reaching for the navy blue spine of the tome from my junior year. When I open it, I remember: I got it toward the end of the year, months after Edward and I broke up, and the only person I let sign it was Alice. Returning it to its shelf, I pull down the one from the year prior; when I open the front cover, a sea of messages greets me in a rainbow of ink colors. I flip the first few pages, reading some notes and bypassing others, until I jump to the inside back cover, where Edward's distinctive scrawl takes up half the cover in ink the color of blood. Words jump out at me: love, always, heart, love, moments, memories, love. It isn't until my eyes find the last lines that I feel as though I've been punched.
I'll always love you, and I'll always be your best friend. I don't know which is better, but I consider myself lucky to have both. With you.
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As if a starting gun has been fired, girls flock to Edward. I can't NOT see them; they drape themselves over him in the cafeteria, in the hallways, by his car in the student lot. It's as if sharks have been circling the slowly-bleeding carcass of our relationship, just waiting for the opportunity to attack, and my losing him was apparently the green light. I park in the overflow lot, even though the student lot is never full, just so that I don't have to witness it. I can feel his eyes on me like a spotlight, but I can never decipher the look – one more modicum of proof that while I thought I knew everything about him, there's so very much I never saw. I spend hours belittling myself and hours berating him; I alternately hate him and hate that I still love him, and somewhere in the middle of all of that, I find that I'm starting to hate myself.
Ridiculous doubts rise in me at night, as I lie beneath my comforter and watch the shadows of trees reach across my ceiling: did he ever really love me? Were there others? Have there been others since? Did he do it on purpose, so that he wouldn't have to break up with me? I try not to imagine him with Rosalie, but the imagined images of him touching her, on top of her, kissing her torture me.
I question everything, and I've never been so completely bewildered, so utterly exhausted. And even with Alice taking up the post of my personal bodyguard-slash-best-friend, I've never felt so lonely.
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