where do you end and where do I begin?
an old journal entry that hit home this week
So what does your inner ‘teen-sam’ need? he says to me, almost pleading, wondering how to fill in the spaces we’ve created in knowing one another.
he takes two steps towards me in the kitchen— I fill the space with resentment and frigid tones…wishing I was alone in my new apartment. he’ll toss back the browns and wrap his arms around me too tightly while we sleep…. like being 17 again and cramming our growing bodies into the twin bed at his parents house. suffocating, yet intoxicating all the same.
We were never good at growing into our own separate adulthoods.
where do I end and you begin?
Four years later, I am writing a poem to the swing set we sat on, to the rings we never wore. King of my heart, destroyer of my worlds. We were kids back then I remind myself, catching our braces during a sloppy kiss.. only to grow up and play house with the same careless sentiment. What could our excuse be now? We always manage to think of something. To romanticize our consistent failure is a protective measure… to shield our vision from how wildly far off we’ve been.
I continue cutting the potatoes in the sink as we trudge through the thick of it, circling round and round the same sentiments and traumas like the dirt-filled water that spirals the drain… right off the tips of my fingers as if I believe we could ever catch this, catch us— like running water I cannot contain.
But I am so patient with you when you stumble past your own promises, drunk again—your phone lost in a cab somewhere, vanishing for 12 hours after our last fight.
There is such patience in ordinary things. I have never waited for anything as long as I had waited for you.
Waited for the growing up, the coming back, the repentance… the need to correct it all. I thought only you had the power to fix the past. I gave all of it to you so quickly, because I had nothing left for myself. What is a self? My self could never be complete without the correct love given from you. It became the ultimate fantasy.
Fantasies are never rooted in anything other than what we wished for under the covers as a child, over our birthday candles, in the stories and books we fell into pressed against our favorite trees. I make a fantasy out of you: the lines thick and bold with color, like the storybook ending we blaze right through.
The death of the lover girl is not only witnessing the death of your storybook ending… but willingly participating in it. Standing at the corners of your own vision, waiting for things to fold.
Hand me the hardest thing to love about you, you would tell me, and I’ll hold it in my hands without second thought.
The problem, I always knew— even at 15 with uncertain edges and blurred vision— was that I could not decipher where I end and you begin. Maybe that’s what love does, I think to myself on a Wednesday night, tucking you into bed after watching you puke up the drinks you swallowed hours before— it blurs the outlines of the self until you can’t tell who you’re saving any longer. I had wanted you to save me. I had wanted a self to save.
Where do I end and you begin?
Where do you end and I begin?
Nothing you can say to me will ever change what you didn’t do when I needed you the most— a younger, angrier version of myself spits out… secretly wishing the blow will strike devastating damage to the most tender part of you. The one I hate for not loving me how I deserved. The one I hate for killing my girlhood too soon. My body cannot tell the difference between the you from then, and the you from now. Both versions stand in front of me in my kitchen, promising not to falter with my heart.
Both versions fall so wildly short.
You wrap your arms around me silently, knowing we are the only people on planet earth who understand the weight of where we’ve been. It’s been 18 years since we met. I do not know where I end and you begin.
Beginning means considering yourself, and I have become the habit of not ever considering myself once. I wake up at 31 and remember I should be worth considering.
We agree that we don’t ever own anything, including each other— and we open the cage door. Is it a cage or an open field? How can I trust myself when in love, I had never known the difference?
Years later, I stand in the front yard, the last place I saw you… walking away. You’ve never been scared to be the one to do it, though our wounds were always the same.
How do I willingly choose to heal the wounds… when the wounds are all I have left of you?
Where do the wounds of you end, and my love for you begin?
Both feel just as tender. Both feel impossible to bear.
It’s always been the question I’ve never found the answers to in all of this, wading through the sleepless nights of trial and error… and the years of back and forth. Where is the self I promised to begin?
She is seated at her desk in homeroom, picking her nails down to the quick, hoping you notice her change in temperament. She is curled on the bathroom floor, wishing you would answer her call. She is running breathlessly through the fields of upstate New York, chasing you down the hill with an intoxicating grin. You turn once—smiling, gone. The light fractures through the trees. She is running breathlessly with Luna down the beach, she is tossing her head back, laughing… forgetful of all the harm that’s been done. Somewhere, the bell rings for class. Somewhere, in another life, we are walking one another home.
Somewhere, I begin again.
If you’d like more stories similar to this one:
This is one of the most captivating pieces of writing I think I’ve ever read, such a beautiful representation of the complexities of attachment. Felt that shit in my soul. Thank you for this!!
Gorgeous and heartbreaking. Cried at a few quotes. The one that I copied into my journal entry for today: “How do I willingly choose to heal the wounds… when the wounds are all I have left of you?”